


take my voice (i'm giving it though i don't feel safe at all)

by cryptidkidprem



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (LOVE that that is a whole entire tag now), (because i simply could not stomach killing off jon or martin i physically could not do it !), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Archivist Sasha James, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), F/M, Gen, On Hiatus, Slow Burn, also canon typical elias bouchard sucking so much ass, background jonmartin
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:46:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25055653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidkidprem/pseuds/cryptidkidprem
Summary: Sasha has not even been Head Archivist for a full year, and already each and every one of her staff — including herself — has been chased or stalked or taunted or threatened by something that lurks in the dark of someone’s scary stories.If she had any brains, Sasha thinks she’d fire the other three and quit herself, effective immediately. Maybe take a nice trip and spend a few weeks somewhere warm. Maybe drag someone along with her to make bad jokes and share drinks with. But Sasha… doesn’t want to quit. There are things — there are people — out there who are drawn inexorably to the archive like a moth to a fire, and right now Sasha is sitting right in the embers. She can’t just bail before she figures out the why of it all, and, selfishly, she can’t do it alone.Maybe if Sasha can untangle the ugly web they’ve caught themselves in, things can go back to normal, whatever that means.
Relationships: Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Comments: 14
Kudos: 44





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello hello. gonna save most of my rambling till the end. thanks for clicking on this fic! this is. literally months in the making. hot damn

Gertrude’s office is a mess.

Well, it’s Sasha’s office now, but the mess is very much Gertrude’s. On Sasha’s first day on the job it it had looked more like a dilapidated storage room than an office, and Sasha might’ve mistaken it as such if not for the faded placard below the little window on the door that reads _HEAD ARCHIVIST_ in a polite little sans serif.

The whole archive is a mess, really, but Sasha’s pretty sure no one’s bothered to do any sort of organizing since long before Gertrude… before she left. There’s boxes sitting open, files on all the desks. Every inch if chaos and clutter. It looks almost like Gertrude’s just stepped out for a moment, that she’ll sweep back in on her no-nonsense flats and ask Sasha what she needs in that clipped, cold tone of hers at any moment now.

It feels like an apt representation for how Sasha’s first week as Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute has been going so far.

Here’s the thing: She knows ( _knew_ ) Gertrude.

Even if it was only a passing acquaintance (frankly, Sasha’s convinced passing acquaintance is about as far as it’s possible to _get_ with Gertrude) that was enough to learn plenty about who Gertrude is as a person.

It might be easy to look at the Archives and see the workings of someone who got way too comfortable in their job; someone who didn’t have to worry about the state of things because this hectic chaos just made sense to her and since it was really just her down here, that was all that mattered.

But Sasha…

Sasha knew Gertrude.

Gertrude is ( _was_ ) the opposite of scattered. Gertrude knew what she was doing. Which means…

Well, Sasha doesn’t think Gertrude ever did anything by accident.

Sasha knows an archiving job with the Magnus Institute is bound to be a bit odd. She spent three months in artifact storage, she’s pretty sure none of the jobs under the roof of this building are going to be anywhere near normal, but even this feels like… something else. Her job, as it is— as it has been said by Elias, at least— is to get this place in order. She’s meant to read the statements, do the research, file them away.

And she’ll… she’ll do that. She will. But she has to think, there’s a reason for all of this, a method behind the supposed madness, and things will be better for everyone if Sasha can figure out what that is. Things’ll just… Make more sense.

Sasha shuts the office door that squeaks like there’s an army of ghosts living in the hinges, a folder tucked safely under her right arm, an old tape recorder in her left.

Yeah, that’s another thing she’s meant to do: record statements digitally. She’s been using her laptop, but some of the statements have been having issues. According to Elias, this is nothing new. Also according to Elias, Gertrude would use tape recorders.

Anyway, her new job has turned out to involve a good amount of talking to herself, and she’s not keen on having an audience. The stuffy silence of being alone in a cramped office is almost worse— _Almost_. Stuffy silence is something she used to be quite accustomed to before Tim got hired and she hasn’t known a moment of peace since.

Sasha sets a tape recorder and a thick file down on her desk. She’d tried three times to get this stupid statement onto her laptop, and had been met, each time, with distortion and error messages and finally the entire recording program crashing.

So. Tape recorder. Tim said she looks very Dale Cooper when he saw her with it, and Sasha’s eyes still ache from all the rolling.

Sasha takes her seat in the ancient rolling chair, which complains and squeaks just like everything else down in the archives. She settles, gets as comfortable as she can manage in an office full of stale dust and old ghosts.

She pulls out a fresh pack of blank tapes; the recorder was easy enough to find in document storage, but no one’s had any luck locating any actual tapes, so Tim’d had to go out and buy new ones.

After a few minutes fumbling with the ancient recorder, Sasha gets it working, testing out the controls and playing her own voice back to make sure everything functions as it should.

Sasha’s tinny voice repeats back to her out of small speakers. Even though she feels a bit silly, it still feels like an accomplishment to sort something out. Now the bigger test: Seeing if this particular statement will record any easier on tape.

She clears her throat, takes a sip from her water bottle, shuffles the papers around into a neat stack.

“Right,” Sasha says, “Let’s just get started, shall we? Let’s see. Statement of… Nathan Watts, regarding a strange encounter on Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh. Statement originally given on April 22nd, 2012. Recorded by Sasha James, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute.”

She takes a breath.

“Statement begins.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok!!!!! promise this'll be my longest and most ramble-y notes section. 
> 
> just to kick things off. this is gonna be a long'un. gonna cover all Four Seasons here :~) so far i have up until late s2/mid s3 planned, with a few scattered scenes from s4 written already. 
> 
> updating schedule is gonna be mega sporadic and might take like a Minute between chaps. cannot stress enough how much of a work in progress this is. patience is greatly appreciated, i promise this is gonna be a fun one if u can stick it out :3c ik this is a Short kickoff, but the way this fic is structured i have a short sort of 'intro' chapter planned out for each ~season~ so. the next chap will literally be out like. tomorrow or later today. with a Little more set up before we dive into things
> 
> also for the record i don't think things magically would've been better if someone besides jon was the archivist, i'm only making this an everyone lives au because i physically could not make myself kill off martin or jon. and tim's the Love Interest/sasha's anchor here so obvi he couldn't die. i think sasha as an archivist falls somewhere between gertrude, jon, and emma harvey. Curiosity is her fatal flaw, yenno? i just have a soft ooey gooey little marshmallow for a heart and i don't want anyone to die :( 
> 
> anyway. that's all i have. thanks for reading if u've read this far. feel free to hmu [on my tumblr](https://nogenders.tumblr.com/) if u wanna !! thanks so much for giving this fic a chance !! 
> 
> title is a lyric from 'the fall' by half-alive !


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> plot time 😏kind of

Sasha has started to see a pattern when it comes to the statements.

The only ones that ever lead anywhere — not that any of them can be said to truly _lead anywhere_ ; at best they get a bunch of loose ends impossible to tie up, or really follow up at all, at worst they get a thorough debunking — are the ones that don’t seem to want to record onto her computer.

It’s only a handful of them. Most of them record just fine, sitting on her work laptop (because there’s no way in hell she’s bringing her personal computer within the walls of this building) as unassuming little MP3 files in a folder on her desktop, stored there for… for something Elias pays her enough not to worry too much about yet.

But then there are some that… don’t work right.

The sound file corrupts, or distorts so heavily on the playback as to be entirely unintelligible, or, in the case of a select few of them, crashes the software (and, on one memorable occasion, the entire laptop) after only a handful of words from Sasha’s mouth.

These are the tricky ones. The _interesting_ ones.

And, see, Sasha has always considered herself a very rational person, the type of woman who needs proof and evidence before she’ll just start believing something. But these statements, while never exactly bringing any concrete proof along with them, are also… nearly impossible to _disprove_ , either. With these, the ‘rational’ explanations almost seem more far-fetched than the idea that there truly is something… _weird_ going on. There is enough uncertainty, enough oddities and questions, to leave Sasha thinking, well… _Maybe_.

So when Antonio Blake’s statement about prophetic death dreams and red tendrils cocooning Gertrude months before she died, won’t go to her hard drive, she’s left feeling… a somewhat uncharacteristic dread.

“Statement ends,” Sasha says, voice gone quiet. “Um.”

And then for a moment, she just sits there, tape unspooling quietly as she stares blankly at her desk.

“That’s… Well.”

The tape is still running. She should get the supplemental notes out of the way. Jon and Tim followed this one up and didn’t find much. Antonio Blake is a fake name. The statement was given years ago, so there’s not much to be done in the way of tracking him down, evne if he had left contact details. (He didn’t.)

The entire thing is almost certainly bullshit, or some kind of prank, or something else.

But she just can’t help that little _what if?_ That little _maybe_ that nags at the back of her mind and makes her throat go all scratchy.

Instead, when she opens her mouth, she says this: “Look, no one knows what happened to Gertrude. Officially? She’s missing. _Elias_ says she died. _‘Died in the line of duty’_ were his exact words, which—” She sighs, pushes her glasses up onto her forehead so she can rub her eyes.

She doesn’t want to say it, but… She’s got so many thoughts roiling for her attention her head feels like a tangled mess of thread, and they have to come out somewhere, so a tape recorder that’s not like anyone but herself will ever listen to seems a safe bet. “Okay, there’s no reports of any bodies matching Gertrude’s turning up _anywhere_ in the UK. I checked. I— Er.” 

She clears her throat. “Well, it was hardly hacking, just a little peek at police records and death certificates issued around the time she disappeared. So she’s not— Officially speaking, she’s still _missing_. I don’t even think they’ve tried to declare her dead yet. There’s still a missing person’s case open for her, but it’s been so long now with no leads, and she hasn’t even got any family, so it seems they’ve mostly just… given up on her. Uh, on it. Her case.”

And here’s the part that almost hurts to come out of her throat. “It’s just… How would Elias know she ‘died in the line of duty’? What does that even _mean_? How would he even know she’s dead? _How_ —”

There’s a knock, and then her door swings open before she can even scramble to answer.

“Hey, boss—”

“Christ, Tim!” Sasha feels like her heart’s just started beating triple-time. 

Tim’s face drops and his eyebrows raise. “Oh, uh. Sorry,” he says. “Am I… interrupting something?”

Sasha forces her shoulders to relax. _It’s just Tim_ , she tells her speeding heart. 

“No, no,” she says, “I was just—” she shakes her head— “no.”

“ … Right.”  Tim searchers her face. “ You… doing okay, Sasha? You seem a bit—”

“No, yeah. I’m fine,” Sashas interrupts. “Just. Some of these statements can be a bit… Spooky, y’know?”

Tim huffs a quiet laugh, relaxing. “Yeah, fair,” he says.

They look at each other for a moment, and then a sly grin slips onto Tim’s face.

“Well…” He says, raising his eyebrows, in a tone of voice that already has the fog of fear that’s settled around Sasha thinning, if only to be replaced with a very familiar apprehension. “If you want a break, I was thinking…”

“ Oh, that’s never a good sign,” Sasha says.

“Hey!” Tim puts a hand over his heart. “Rude.”

Sasha can’t help it; she laughs. “You were _thinking_?”

Tim gives her a look, but it’s more endearing than anything. He comes to perch on the edge of her desk, so Sasha has to pull her things away so they don’t get knocked about.

“ Well, it’s Jon’s birthday next week,” he says, “thought we might do a little surprise party for him? Just something simple, here in the Archives, y’know? Cake, birthday hats, probably _tea_ if Martin’s there.”

“Huh.” 

It’s such a tonal shift Sasha is able to… not forget her anxiety, per se, but delicately set them aside to deal with later so she can almost relax.

Sasha huffs. “Are you sure Jon’s the type to enjoy a surprise party?”

“Yes,” Tim answers, matter-of-factly. “He’d be the type to put up a big fuss and pretend to be bothered, but he’ll secretly be extremely touched we all went out of our way to do something nice for him.”

Sasha nods. “Actually, you’re probably right.”

Tim beams. “I usually am,” he tells her smugly.

Sasha hums, wrinkling her nose. “I think that’s up for debate.”

“ Jeez, not gonna cut me any slack today, are you?”

Sasha can’t quite help the grin on her face, no matter how hard she bites it back. “Maybe. You’re very fun to tease.”

Tim sighs over-dramatically, affecting a hurt, put-upon look. “You _wound_ me, Sasha.”

Sasha laughs, and just like that, the last bit of tension bleeds from her shoulders. It’s just like that with Tim. It’s impossible to feel hopeless with him around. 

“Should I expect you to be jumping out at me from behind dusty fill boxes on my birthday, too?” She asks.

Tim scoffs. “Well it wouldn’t be a surprise if I just told you, now would it?”

“Guess not,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Anyway. You mentioned a party?” She stops the recording with a decisive click.

—

Sasha’s half-way through recording a statement (to her laptop, flawlessly. Boring) when she hears Martin outside her office door and remembers she’s been meaning to talk to him.

She pauses, mid-word. “Oh, hang on,” she says before she pauses her recording. (Most of what she does here is talking to herself these days, and she’s kind of just gotten used to it now.)

She pokes her head out her. “Martin?”

Martin, rummaging around in his desk, starts a bit, but he comes over. “Oh, hey, Sasha, what’s up?” He asks. “Need something?”

Sasha nods. “Yeah, um.” She crosses to her desk, leaving her door open behind her, starts digging around in the files.

She’s only just managed to get the place in order, and here she is making a total mess of things. Maybe Gertrude left the place the way she did because she just couldn’t be assed to organize it.

“ Can you do some follow up for the Vittery case?” She asks. “Just double check some details, maybe make some calls to old neighbors, landlords, stuff like that. Jon was going to do it today, but he’s out sick, so—”

“Wait,” Martin interrupts, “Jon’s out sick?”

“Oh. Yeah,” Sasha confirms. Right. She almost forgot Martin’s a perpetual worrier. “He texted me this morning. Won’t be in today.”

Martin hums, a little furrow appearing between his brows. Sasha answers by raising her own eyebrows, and Martin ducks his head, cheeks going pink. (Not much of a feat; Martin blushes at the drop of a hat.)

“ Just—” He starts, “ _Jon Sims_ is _out sick_?”

Sasha would laugh, if this was anyone else but Martin, and the incredulity in his voice came from anywhere but genuine concern. “I know,” she says, aiming for levity, “Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

Martin nods hesitantly. “ Is he… D-do you think he’s okay?”

“Well, he’s okay enough to send me a text. He says it’s just a stomach bug or something.” 

“Right.” Martin nods again, less convincing this time, especially when you add on the way he’s hovering awkwardly and fidgeting with the hem of his sleeve. 

And Sasha is, well, she’s still human, and even though she’s Martin’s boss now, she’s sympathetic. “Martin?” She probes gently.

Martin looks up at her. “It’s just… Jon’s _never_ sick. Or, or he never misses work. Do you think he’s—”

“Hey,” Sasha cuts him off. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Probably just the flu.”

“Yeah, but,” Martin says, obviously unconvinced. “He was _fine_ yesterday. And, what, suddenly he’s just sick enough that he’s calling in from work?”

Sasha hums. “Maybe he didn’t want to have to research spooky spiders. You know how he gets.”

Martin hums. “Maybe.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine tomorrow,” Sasha reasons, doing her best to calm him. She’s not… the most soothing prescreens, but she likes Martin enough. Sasha sighs — not unkindly, she hopes — watching the seeds of anxiety take root and bloom in Martin’s heart in real time. “Will it make you feel better if you went to check up on him?”

“Er.” Martin stammers a bit, before he finally nods decisively. “I mean. Yeah. Yes, it would.”

“Well, alright then,” Sasha says, with a decisive nod.

“Alright?”

“Yeah,” Sasha says. “If he’s not better tomorrow, why don’t you just. Go see if he needs anything.”

“Really?” Martin asks, making a face.

Sasha shrugs. “Yeah, sure.”

“That’s not… weird?”

“Well. Maybe a little,” Sasha tells him truthfully. “But… Look at where we work. We investigate ghost spiders for a living. We deal in weird everyday.”

Martin huffs, shoulders slumping. “I— okay. Fair. Thanks, Sasha,” he says.

“Mhm,” Sasha hums, relieved. “Hate to see you worry.”

“Heh, yeah,” Martin ducks his head self-consciously. “Can’t, can’t really help it, you know?”

She does . Martin worries, she knows this much about him by now. “Yeah,” she tells him. “It’s alright.”

Martin shrugs, glancing away self-consciously, but making no move to actually leave or get back to work.

Sasha tilts her head, waits a beat. “… You could always go today? Over lunch?”

Martin perks up. “Oh, well, I mean. I… Maybe  I, I could. Bring him soup. Or tea. Or something.”

Sasha almost laughs, but stops herself. “Yeah, alright.” She’s not sure how Jon will react — he’s prickly when people try to do nice things for him on his best days — but she  can practically _see_ the little seeds of anxiety taking root in Martin’s chest in real time and she knows how much his work will suffer if he’s on edge all day, so she figures it can’t hurt. 

Martin gives her a smile; small land shaky but real. “Oh. You’re sure?

“Sure.” Sasha nods. “That sounds… nice.”

He does look relieved. “Thanks, Sasha.”

“Mhm,” Sasha hums. “Just, y’know. Text him first, or something.”

“Right, yeah, good call,” Martin says. “Thanks again.”

“No problem,” she tells him. “Guess Tim’s gonna be doing some ghost-spider research.”

“Oh, I can help out when I get back,” Martin assures her.

Sasha tells him he doesn’t need to, but maybe if she gets Tim and Martin on this together they’ll be able to finish it by the end of the day. Martin smiles, and leaves, closing the door gently behind him.

Sasha huffs fondly, turns back to the half-finished statement on her desk, and lets herself get absorbed in her work. In the hours that follow, the conversation fades from the forefront of her mind, settles into background information.

So it comes as something of a shock when, three hours later, the door to her office bangs open again and Martin and Jon storm in and dump a handful of dead worms onto her desk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just a heads up, the next chap might not be out for awhile! patience is deeply appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here come the worms babie 🐛🐛🐛🐛🐛
> 
>  **content warning** for this chap. it's extremely Worm Heavy, but if u can handle the Canon worminess this should be FINE. it is seriously watered down compared to the descriptions we get of timothy hodge and jane prentiss in the podcast. just mind the Canon Typical Worms tag
> 
> this time tim and sasha get to pine for 4 years while we get a fucken jm speedrun in the background. i promise next chap is gonna be fairly Tim Heavy to make up for the fact he isn't in this one At All

“ Okay, okay okay!” Sasha actually has to shout a little bit to be heard above Jon and Martin, neither of whom seem like they’re about to stop talking anytime soon, even when it’s nearly impossible to understand a word of what they’re saying when they keep talking over each other.

That gets them to shut up, Martin’s wide eyes locking on her and Jon’s spine going rigidly straight.

Sasha sighs. “Okay,” she says, “I didn’t catch a _word_ of that. Start over, and this time… Only one of you talk at a time, please.”

For a moment, neither of them say a word. Martin shoots Jon a look, which Jon returns only after Martin’s looked away again. 

“One of you, say _something_ ,” she prompts.

“Uh,” Martin says, at the same moment Jon says, “well…”

Their mouths snap shut again.

“No, erm,” Martin starts, “ Y-you— uh, why don’t you go, Jon.”

“Right,” Jon clears his throat, gives a sharp nod, and immediately undercuts any projected confidence when his voice wavers with his next words. “Uh. Should I… Sh-should I give a statement?”

Sasha raises her eyebrows. “Is this… Something that would require a statement?”

Jon sucks in a breath, fidgets with his hands. “It’s… it’s about… I saw Jane Prentiss.”

“Oh,” Sasha says, and then the name clicks into place. “ _Oh_.” She sits up. “So these—”

“Yes,” Jon says, grimacing at the dead worms. “Er. Sorry about that.”

“I can clean that up, if you want,” Martin offers, sheepishly fiddling with his sleeve. “We just figured… Proof, y’know?”

“It’s fine,” Sasha assures him. Gross, but there’s more pressing things on her mind right now. “ Just for the record, next time you try t boring me proof, I prefer a photo to… worm corpses, but it’s alright.”

“Noted,” Jon says tersely. 

There’s a moment of silence, awkward and sharp and tense. “So,” Sasha says, breaking it. “Should I just—” There’s a recorder on her desk. She’s taken to just keeping it there; the statements that need it are turning up more and more, and… Well, she’s beginning to look for them, now, subconsciously. It’s almost disappointing when one of them records as a neat little MP3 file on her laptop.

“Ah.” Jon gives the recorder a look. “Yes, I… Yes.”

Sasha studies him for a second, the tight set of his mouth, the deep crease between his brows. Moments like these, it’s hard to believe he’s five years younger than Sasha. 

“You know you don’t… have to give one,” Sasha tells him, although it almost hurts her to do it. “You can just. Tell me. No tapes.”

Jon sighs. “No, no… I, I think I’d like to. That’s what we do, isn’t it? Categorize things like this. Prentiss is dangerous, we should… we should have this on record.”

Sasha hums contemplatively, allowing herself a moment of silent relief. “Alright,” she tells him. She pulls a fresh tape out of a drawer, sets the recorder on the desk between them.

the whole room seems to take a breath as Sasha hits record. Sasha clears her throat. “Okay. Statement of Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood, archival assistants at the Magnus Institute. Regarding…” She looks up at Jon.

“Ah.” Jon leans forward, fingers bracing the edge of Sasha’s desk. “An encounter—“

“ _Encounter_ ,” Martin cuts in incredulously, “Jon, you could’ve been—”

“ _An encounter_ with the thing that used to be Jane Prentiss.”

Sasha nods. “Statement taken directly, February twenty-eighth, twenty-sixteen.”

And Jon gives his statement. For a man who’s usually all stops and starts when he speaks, gruff and prickly and, admittedly, somewhat abrasive, it all seems to fade away while he says his piece.

“Er. So I was doing the follow up on the Vittery case you asked me for, but I was hitting… a few dead ends. One dead end in particular, really.” He pauses, takes a breath, screws up his face determinedly. “Look, I’m not— not overly fond of spiders. I’m… sure you’ve both noticed as much. But I didn’t want that to impede my investigation; I don’t want to be the type of person who lets my personal phobias get in the way of doing a thorough job.”

He pauses, has the good grace to look guilty as he tells Sasha about breaking into a dead man’s apartment complex via a basement window.

“When I got inside,” Jon continues, “something was… wrong. I don’t know what it was exactly; there was a-a smell. A feeling. It was… too warm; almost muggy or humid. And, after a minute there was… a sound, like. Like—”

“ _Writhing_ ,” Martin interjects quietly, eyes focused on where his hands have twisted into his sleeves in his lap.

Jon shivers, nods. “Writhing,” he agrees. 

He looks a bit queasy, when he describes the… _thing_ he saw there. From the description of it, Prentiss is even more far gone than her last recorded sighting: more holes than human, the host to innumerable crawling, silver worms, black at the end like a burnt match, and faster than any parasite has the right to be. 

Sasha doesn’t interrupt, but she thinks Jon made the right call in bolting, fleeing the apartment and not stopping until he’d gotten on on the train and the doors had sealed safely shut behind him.

“I tried to call you,” Jon goes on to say. “It felt like I should, considering Prentiss is still an open case here, but I was already three stops away before I realized I’d dropped my phone, so I just… Went home. Figured I’d just deal with it in the morning.”

Jon sighs, a shaky puff of an exhale. 

“B-but then. I’d just gotten out of the shower and the power just went out entirely. A complete blackout; not just a blown fuse or a burnt out bulb, but everything in my flat just… Died, at once.” He runs a hand through his hair, an erratic, twitchy motion. “And then someone started knocking on my door. It sounded so normal, and I almost just… let her in.”

Martin is very pale; he looks like he wants to say something, maybe offer Jon a cup of tea or a blanket or something else Martin-y like that, but he keeps his mouth shut.

“I felt something, on my foot,” Jon says, “and when I looked down, they were— the worms were crawling under my door, trying to, to— get to me. I-I kind of… erm. Freaked out. But these things, good lord, I wasn’t even wearing shoes, I was fresh out of the shower, the way they squished and left all this, this goo on my floor.” His eyes are very wide. “I did everything i could to barricade myself in, after that. Put a sheet under the door, sealed my windows, et cetera. I just… did not want those _things_ in my home.

“I didn’t sleep. I grabbed a fly swatter and sat down as far from the door as I could, waiting f-for, I don’t know. Something. I don’t think I could’ve slept, anyway. She kept knocking, and it was… unsettling. I thought— I don’t know what I thought. I think I was just… planning to wait there for her to leave on her own, or something? I-I think I would have, too, if. Er.”

He stops, swallows, casts a quick glance over at Martin as a heavy silence settles over all three of them. 

_Oh, god_ , Sasha thinks. “… If Martin hadn’t come by to check up on you.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Jon nods. 

Sasha turns to Martin. “So you saw Prentiss at Jon’s flat?”

“Um. Yeah,” Martin says, taking his eyes off Jon to look back at Sasha. “It was— she was— I mean, I got there, and, and everything seemed fine. I didn’t even think anything of it, but then I was, like, ten feet from Jon’s front door and she was just. There, behind me, coming _towards me_. And there were— there were _so many worms_ , Sasha.”

She shivers, feels grateful to see them both, whole and worm-free across from her. “How did you… escape?”

Martin ducks his head. “Right, I, uh— I might’ve screamed. A bit.”

“ _A bit_ ,” Jon cuts in, “I could hear you through the door.”

“Yes, well, it’s a good thing your door’s not very thick, isn’t it?” Martin counters.

Jon folds his arms across his chest sullenly, but concedes the point. 

“Anyway, I, I definitely panicked, but— I guess Jon heard me, because he opened up and started shoving me and we managed to get past her before she could totally corner us again. And then the next thing I knew we were running out of the building again and— and, well.” He shrugs. 

“And you came here?” Sasha asks.

“Well,” Martin answers, “Jane followed Jon all the way from Boothby Road to his flat, which is, like, three trains away, so god knows they could’ve followed me back to mine. Where else is there to go?”

“Right.” Sasha nods, slowly turning everything over in her head. There’s a lot to process after any statement, and one that hits this close to home— Sasha’s guts churn a little bit. “I guess that makes sense. And are you both… are you alright? She didn’t… _touch_ either of you, right?”

“No, we’re fine,” Jon answers. “I mean, er…”

“There was, there were a-a few worms, obviously, but you can see they’re, well.” Martin gestures vaguely to Sasha’s desk. “We got them.”

Sasha nods again. “Good. Good.”

Sitting on Sasha’s desk next to her laptop, Sasha’s phone choses that moment to buzz, making all three of them jump. Sasha flips it over, reads the words on her screen. Goes very still. Reads them again.

“Jon…”

“Y-yes?”

Sasha looks up at Jon. “ You… you said you lost your phone? In Vittery’s old building?”

Jon hesitates, a tremor of anxiety in his voice. “Yes? Last night. W-why?”

“ I just got a text. From _you_.”

“I—” Jon blinks. “ _What_?”

Sasha holds her hone out. Jon squints, and Martin leans in so they can both read.

“ _Keep them_ ,” Martin reads aloud, “ _We will see them soon enough. They will want to see it when the Archivist’s crimson fate arrives._ W-what—”

“I don’t know,” Sasha says. “But it’s not the first I’ve gotten. Jon… ‘You’ texted me this morning. Said you were sick. That you had a… a stomach bug.”

Jon pales. Martin looks vaguely ill. “Does that mean— She’s… _Prentiss_ is texting you?”

“Seems so,” Sasha agrees. 

“Um.” Martin holds up his hand like he’s asking a question in class. “Can I just say? I-I don’t like that.”

Jon sinks down in the uncomfortable office chair Sasha’s provided him with. “No,” he agrees softly, “me neither.”

Sasha huffs. “Seems you might want to replace your phone, Jon.”

Jon looks very far away. “Mhmm.”

Sasha’s eyes flick between Jon and Martin. “You also might not… want to go back to your flat.”

This manages to startle a huff of laughter out of Jon. “ I think I’d sooner burn the place down than set foot in there again, frankly.”

“I meant _either_ of you,” Sasha clarifies. “ I mean. You’re right, Martin. Prentiss could follow you home just like she did with Jon.”

Martin goes very, very pale. “Y-yeah. Probably smart.”

“Look, um.” Sashas shifts in her seat, puts on her best sympathetic voice. It’s harder than it should be; she does care for Jon and Martin, but the statements… take so much out of her, even when she’s not the one talking, it’s hard to wrangle up the energy to be gentle with them right now. “There’s a room in document storage here. It’s sealed off, so. If the two of you… I dunno, wanted to pull some cots in there or something. It’s no five-star hotel, but… You’d be safe from worms.”

Jon’s face goes blank, like he’s trying to process her words. Martin flushes.

“Oh,” he says, looking at Jon even though Jon doesn’t look back. “I mean…”

“A-are you sure?” Jon finally asks.

Sasha shrugs. “If you’re interested. It might be… well, it’ll probably _suck_ , but…”

“We’ll be safe,” Martin says.

“No worms,” Jon reasons.

“No worms,” Sasha offers.

There’s a beat of silence. “Thank you,” Jon says.

Sasha waves him off. “Look, the both of you just. Go relax. Have some tea, or something. And don’t—” she looks at Martin— “make it yourself. Go the café. Charge it to the Institute. Just. Have a sit down. I’ll… get things sorted down here.”

She gets Jon and Martin out of her office, and waits until the door is shut behind them to slump down in her seat, scrubbing a hand over her face. It takes her a moment to realize the sound of tape unspooling is still whirring away from her desk.

“Shit,” she mutters, shutting the tape off.

—

Sasha carefully places a tape recorder down on the table without taking her eyes off of— whatever it is that sits across from her. It’s the second day this thing has been hanging around outside of her flat, and after Jon’s incident with Prentiss Sasha is not keen on the idea of any more _creatures_ following her home.

The— the man, the thing, the monster— tilts his head, humming discontentedly. It looks human but isn’t, and Sasha isn’t sure why she’s so certain of this.

“Oh,  must you, Archivist?”

“Yes, I think so,” Sasha answers, not taking her eyes off of him for a second. “And even if not, I think I _want_ to. Something tells me I’ll want a record of this.”

He sighs, almost disappointed. “Yes, I suppose you _would_.”

Sasha bristles. “And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Pale eyes bore into Sasha’s. “ That’s not _really_ what you want to ask me, is it?”

It isn’t, even if she doesn’t like being dismissed, being brushed off, not having her questions answered. “What _are_ you?”

“Oh,” he laughs, and something about it feels wrong. Sasha can’t describe it, but the sound of that laugh makes it feel like there’s static in her ears, itching at the back of her eyeballs, a low-grade case of tinnitus in all her senses. “I hardly see how _that_ matters.”

It matters because Sasha needs answers, because she does not like living in a world where she doesn’t know the score, where she can look at a man and know he’s wearing his humanity like a mask and she doesn’t know what’s behind it. “It matters because you’ve been following me, so obviously you want to talk, and the least you can do is _answer me_ when I _ask_ —”

“I wouldn’t be able to describe it even if I wanted to, Archivist. Which I do not.” He cuts her off, the funny little smile sliding off his face. “Ah, how would a melody describe itself when asked?”

Sasha shuts her eyes, takes a deep breath. “Look,” she says, “if you’re just going to talk in circles and use cheap riddles on me, I’m going to leave. I’ve had a long week, and believe it or not, I have better things to do then—”

Again, Sasha is interrupted. “Alright, alright,” the blond thing says; some of that drawling amusement has faded, which is a bit gratifying. “I apologize. I am _sorry_.”

Sasha blinks, snorts. “Really.”

“Really. Believe it or not, it is not my intention to… get under your skin. I am Michael; that’s… All I am able to tell you.”

Slowly, Sasha relaxes back into her seat, cautious but less on edge. “What do you want?”

The thing— Michael— waves a bony hand. “I want to help you.”

“ _Help?_ ”

Now Michael’s the one who looks like his patience is being tried. Good. Two can play at that game. “That is what I said, yes.”

“Ooo-kay,” Sasha says, “help with what, exactly? With the… the Jane Prentiss situation?”

Whatever ground Sasha’d won vanishes out for under her. Michael laughs again, pillowing a cheek in one hand and looking at Sasha like one might look at a cat with its head stuck in something. “Oh,” he— it— whatever— says, “you really have no idea what’s going on at all, do you? You still don’t even see the shape of the thing you’re living inside of.”

Sasha grits her teeth. “Guess not. Are you planning to enlighten me, or are you just going to sit here and mock me all day?”

Michael hums. “No. I still want to help.”

“How, then? Going to pop into the Archives and help me sort files? Are you—” A thought occurs to her. “Would you give me a statement?”

Michael sours immediately. “Absolutely _not_ , Archivist,” he tells her, in a voice like ice down Sasha’s spine.

Sasha sighs. “Well then— What? What can you actually do to help me?”

Michael regards her. “Perhaps I just want to… give you a bit of a leg up.”

“But you won’t just tell me anything outright.”

Michael shrugs, a movement like a roller coaster about to crash, or a broken window sliding shut. “You’re the Archivist. The gathering of information is more your domain, yes?”

“And getting it from you doesn’t count,” Sasha deadpans.

“I wouldn’t want to give too much away too quickly,” Michael drawls. 

Sasha really starts to contemplate just getting up and leaving. She’s not sure what keeps her here other than… Well, she knows Michael knows something, and she can’t just leave until she’s done everything to dig the information out. “Are you trying to help me… figure out how to stop Prentiss?”

“Oh, no. I really have no interest in whether you or your… companions live or die,” Michael tells her baldly. “It is simply that the flesh-hive is… well, always rather _rash_.”

Sasha raises an eyebrow. “Is that a _joke?”_

_“_ Maybe,” Michael smiles faintly. “I do want to be your friend.”

Sasha snorts. “Friends? Sorry, mate, I don’t usually go around chumming it up with monsters and creeps who speak in riddles.”

“Fine,” Michael says, “then perhaps I can speak your language. While I may not care either way whether you, or Timothy Stoker, or Martin Blackwood, or Jonathan Sims—”

“ _How do you—_ ”

“— manage to save your own skins, I’m assuming you do, so…”

Sasha goes dead silent. Michael watches her, and she watches him right back.

Finally, he says, “If you have any interest in saving them, I will be waiting at Hanwell Cemetery.”

For a moment, Sasha doesn’t move a muscle. She doesn’t even breathe. 

The next moment, she snatches the recorder off the table, pulls her bag up onto her shoulder, and storms out. Michael’s eerie, distorted laughter follows her all the way out the door.

—

Sasha is on her way to Hanwell Cemetery. 

In her bag she has a tape recorder, 3 extra blank cassettes, a switchblade, and a canister of mace. Just to be sure. It’s getting dark by the time she gets off work, but Sasha can’t stomach waiting any longer, so she hurries along the busy streets, dodging other pedestrians and slipping between cars on her way. 

Sasha wants to tell herself she’s doing this because of whatever veiled threat that thing that calls itself Michael made against Tim and Martin and Jon — and she is, a little bit. If she can keep them safe, she will. She’ll do whatever she can to keep them out of harm’s way; but that’s not the reason she’s crisscrossing London to an old graveyard on the behest of something not human while night falls around her.

See, Sasha’s always thought of herself as a very reasonable person. She won’t say she doesn’t believe in the supernatural, just that she’s… got a healthy level of skepticism. She needs proof; she needs to dig and dig until she can find the answers, and more often than not the answer is that whatever haunted amulet or creepy book or ghost she’s investigating winds up being… total bullshit. 

But now there’s Michael, with all the bones in his hands and the laugh like a broken record and the hints that he knows something about the worms. There’s a difference between skepticism and denial, and Sasha refuses to cross that border. She just… she needs more information. 

She wants evidence; she wants it on record.

Sasha stops about half a block away from the cemetery itself. Even from here, she can see Michael, waiting for her just outside the gate. 

For a moment, Sasha slows. It hasn’t seen her yet; now’s her last chance to turn around, pretend she didn’t see him, do the rational thing and go home. 

Sasha keeps going.

Sasha knows the exact moment Michael spots her; that crooked, twisted smile slips onto his face, and he tilts his head to the side in such a way that were it literally anyone else, Sasha would’ve said it looked innocent and curious. 

Sasha opens her mouth, but Michael shakes his head and silently beckons her onward before any words can find their way out. 

Sasha knows she’s going to follow, but still allows herself a spark of fiery indignation before she does. Why ask her to meet at a cemetery if he’s just going to lead her away to somewhere else entirely? Just because he can? Just to be purposefully even more maddening? The latter seems likely, just based on her limited interactions with this thing so far.

At the end of the block, there is an old, seemingly abandoned building. The windows are boarded up, the walls are covered in layers of graffiti, the kind that takes years to build up properly. 

Somehow, Sasha is not surprised when Michael walks in through the inexplicably open door. She sighs. Before she follows, she reaches into her bag, takes out the tape recorder. Funny, she didn’t even think to bring a flashlight, but she brought _this_. Even funnier that the recorder somehow comforts her more than a flashlight (or the knife and the mace she brought along) would.

It’s dark inside the little room; not pitch, but Sasha can barely see more than a few feet in front of her. She can see Michael fine. There’s no way not to see him, even if she doesn’t want to look directly at him. He seems brighter than the gloom around her, somehow. More vivid, not quite of this world in the way a person should be.

Sasha opens her mouth, throat all full of questions, but they die before they hit her tongue. 

Over the past few weeks, Sasha has become intimately familiar with the sound of worms. The institute may not be under siege the way Jon’s flat was, but enough of Prentiss’ hoard has found its way to their doorstep in the interim that there’s a certain sound she’s learned to pick up on when they’re near.

In the dead silence of what Sasha now thinks used to be some kind of pub, Sasha catches the sound of a quiet, wet squirm. Sasha all but forgets about Michael as her head whips towards the far corner, where she can now hear what sounds like an agonized, wheezy groan. 

Her feet carry her, almost of their own accord, over to a slumped shape she didn’t notice until all her senses screamed at her that it’s there, demanding her attention. The thing she sees makes Michael look positively _normal_. She’s seen the worms, she remembers the picture Jon painted of Jane Prentiss, the way she seemed more worm than flesh. 

Sasha considers herself to be a very level-headed person. Still, there is no preparing yourself to see something like that in person.

To put it simply, ‘flesh-hive’ seems an apt description. She must make some kind of noise, because she sees the moment the thing that probably used to be a person notices her. It should be dead. There’s no reasonable explanation for it _not being dead_ , and yet its head snaps up, silver worms cascading out from every orifice, down its front, and wriggling fiercely towards her in a horrible silver wave. 

What happens next is a bit of blur. 

Panic and adrenaline clouding her system, her only thought is that she does not, under any circumstance, want to end up like whatever poor sod is sitting on the floor over there. She needs to get out but there’s nowhere to go and her back’s up against the bar, and all she’s got is— is some old fire extinguisher a worker must’ve left behind. 

Working on what she can only describe as instinct and pure panic, Sasha pulls the nozzle and sprays at the mass of worms getting closer and closer by the second.

She’s not sure what she expected to happen, but watching the worms freeze and shrivel in on themselves really isn’t it. Heart pounding violently behind her ribs, it takes her a moment to realize that they’re… they’re dying. The ones hit with the CO2 from the fire extinguisher are shuddering and coming to a slimy end. 

Sasha sucks in a sharp breath, scrambles back up to her feet, and just keeps spraying. She blasts them all, comes to the pitted body in the corner and sprays until the canister goes completely empty. 

Breathing heavily, Sasha drops the extinguisher on the ground with a dull thunk. It squishes a few worm carcasses, and rolls wetly away from Sasha’s shoes, resting against the knee of what is now just an ugly, pitted corpse. 

Odd, she thinks distantly, that her first thought is that she needs to know more about the unfortunate man on the floor. The worms are dead but Sasha’s hands are still trembling something fierce when she reaches into his dirty jeans to check his pockets. No phone, but she does find a wallet in his left pocket. There might be more in his back pockets, but she’s not about to roll him over to check. She doesn’t fancy touching him any more than she absolutely has to.

It takes her a few tries to get the ID out with the way her fingers shake, but she manages it at last. 

“Timothy Hodge?” The name strikes her right away. Well, that answers that, she supposes. Hopefully the poor man didn’t infect anyone else between his encounter with Harriet Lee and his ugly death. Sasha does not want to think about the possibility of there being _more_ things like this out there.

She doesn’t even bother to try and put the license back in the wallet, just lets them both fall to the floor. She sucks in a ragged breath through her mouth, and then wheels around when she feels a sharp stab a few inches shy of her shoulder. 

For a second she’s convinced the gas must be making her hallucinate; Michael’s fingers are long, sharp, and distorted, digging into Sasha’s skin like scissors through paper.

That’s about all Sasha can take. “What the _hell_ are you playing at?!” She demands of it, smacking those twisted hands away from her skin. “Wh— _Why_ bring me here? Was this just s-some kind of— of— elaborate plan to get me _killed_?”

Infuriatingly, all Michael does is smile at her. “On the contrary, Archivist,” it says, with a maddeningly playful lilt. “I believe...” It holds up its hand. Between two knife-like fingertips, it shows her a squirming, silver worm, presumably once black at the tip before it got itself coated in Sasha’s blood. With a gesture like it’s snapping its fingers, Michael slices the worm neatly in two, letting the bisected corpse fall, now limp and motionless, to join its brethren on the ground. “I just saved your life.”

Sasha’s eyes go wide, and she takes a stuttering step backwards. “I, I didn’t—” Her hand goes to the cut on her arms, sticky and wet, but, blessedly, worm-free— “I didn’t even fucking _feel it_ , I—”

“Mm, no. The Hive can be quite sneaky when it wishes.”

There’s blood soaking through Sasha’s shirtsleeve, staining her jacket. Her shoes are covered in the goo of a hundred squashed worms, and she’s dizzy from CO2 fumes. “I thought you said you didn’t care if I lived or died,” she manages.

“I don’t,” Michael says, “but I wasn’t lying. I want to help. And I want to be your friend.”

Sasha doesn’t have an answer to that. She does not want to be Michael’s friend. She does, however, now have a way to defend the people she cares about against Jane Prentiss and her worms.

“Well, go on,” Michael says, “I’ve said my piece. I can see you itching to get back to your precious archives, your dusty old statements. Don’t let me keep you.”

Sasha doesn’t move until Michael has crossed the pub and vanished into a door on the far wall Sasha’s positive wasn’t there when she entered the room. It’s not until the door is completely closed that Sasha slumps, bracing her hands on her knees and taking several deep breaths until her heart rate’s returned to something resembling normal. She stands shakily, picks up her bag from the floor, and, a few steps away, her fallen tape recorder. She’s a bit soothed to see it still recording; at least she caught this whole thing on tape.

Sasha lets out a sharp, shaky laugh. “Statement ends, I guess,” she says, and clicks the recorder off.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> timmy time!!!! 
> 
> ft. breaking into a murder victim's apartment, and other fun couple's bonding activities <3

Sasha is antsy.

She wants to say she’s nervous. She _should_ be nervous. Any reasonable person would be nervous right now; if they get caught doing what they’re doing they’re likely to end up arrested for, best case scenario, breaking and entering, and worst case? Well. They might end up murder suspects.

Possibly.

(Probably.)

And yet, standing outside the door to Gertrude Robinson’s flat while Tim gets to work picking the lock, she mostly just feels… curious. Excited, even, that she’s finally going to find out what the hell’s in there. Maybe there’s answers behind this locked door; another piece in the puzzle Gertrude left her that doesn’t seem to have a picture on a box for her to follow.

Sasha stands on the balls of her feet, looking, she is positive, as shifty and suspicious as it is possible for one person to look in the hall where a dead woman used to live. (Well, besides maybe Tim, who’s kneeling down with one of Sasha’s bobby pins in the lock.)

She glances down at Tim, the little furrow between his brow, the way his tongue peeks out between his lips just so like a confused golden retriever.

“Are you done yet?” She whispers.

“Jeez.” Tim doesn’t even look up at her, but Sasha can still tell he’s rolling his eyes. “Hold your horses, I’m almost there.”

Sasha frowns, wrinkles her nose, grumbles something indistinct under her breath.

“Well, you’re welcome to give it a go, if you like!” Tim shoots at her.

Sasha frowns. “ I’m not good at this bit.”

“Right.” Tim chuckles. “Spend all your time tucked away all safe in your office hacking databases while you get the rest of us to do your dirty work for you. You only like me for my burglary skills.”

Sasha chooses to ignore most of what he’s saying. “I don’t ‘hack databases,’ Tim.”

Tim’s grin only widens. “Sure you don’t. Remind me again how you got Gerard Keay’s arrest reports from the police department? Or the copy of the sealed court proceedings for his murder trial? Did you just turn up at the front desk and ask nicely?”

Sasha opens her mouth, and slowly closes it again. 

Tim seems to take that as a victory, as he is wont to do. “That’s what I thought,” he mumbles, followed by a decisive click from the door and a soft cry of, “Aha!” He turns the door handle. “There we go.”

Sasha winces. “ Keep your voice down, please.”

Tim gives her a look, and pushes the door open. “Relax,” he says, as he ushers Sasha inside the flat and follows after her. “We’re fine. No one saw us.”

‘You don’t know that.” Sasha fumbles for a light switch on the walls near the door, relieved when she finds it and discovers the electricity hasn’t been turned off yet. “Police could be on their way right now.”

“I suppose so. Then we’d have a lot of explaining to do when Jon and Martin have to bail us out of jail.”

Sasha raises her eyebrows. “ Are you always this cavalier when you break into a dead woman’s flat?”

Tim scoffs. “Please. I’m an archival assistant at the Magnus Institute. At this point half the _job_ is breaking into dead people’s flats.”

Sasha fights a losing battle with her own smile. “That’s sadly accurate, isn’t it?”

By some unspoken agreement, Sasha heads to one end of the room, and Tim the other, so they can cover more ground.

“We seem to be doing an awful lot of it,” Tim comments. “Hang on. Go back a sec. She’s _dead_? I thought she was just… missing.”

Sasha’s nose scrunches up. “Well, officially, yeah. But…”

“But?”

Sasha nudges a loose cable — some kind of laptop charger, Sasha thinks — with her toes, avoiding Tim’s eyes. “Just… something strange Elias said.”

Tim makes a _noise_. “Oh, that little weasel? What’d he do this time?”

Sasha hesitates. She trusts Tim. She _does_. Obviously. He’s… Well, she’s pretty sure he’s her best friend, if she was going to let anyone in on her… What, suspicions? It would be him. But it still feels _dangerous_ , in some way. She trusts Tim, yeah, but she doesn’t want to do anything to put him at risk.

She also knows Tim, though, and knows he won’t let it drop if she tries to brush him off. “He just… when he promoted me, he… he said she’d ‘died in the line of duty,’ whatever the hell that means. Even though there’s no body or record of her death _at all_ , and no reasonable way for Elias to know she’s dead, much less _how_ she died.”

Tim snorts, a floorboard creaking under his shoes. “So, what,” he says, “You think he killed her and dumped her in the Thames or something?”

He’s joking; jovial, breezy, lighthearted. The idea is silly, in his mind.

Sasha says nothing.

Tim stops moving. “Wait.” Sasha isn’t looking at him, but she can feel when his eyes snap up to bore into her. “ _Seriously_?”

Sasha purses her lips. “Look, I-I just can’t rule anything out.”

“Fucking hell, Sasha!”

Sasha crosses her arms and finally turns on him, expecting anger but instead finding wide eyes and disbelief. “Well,” she stammers, “why do you think we’re here in the first place?”

Tim gapes. “Believe it or not, my first thought was not ‘because  you think our boss might be a _murderer_ ’! I mean, you didn’t think to maybe _mention_ this to me?”

“I dunno, Tim!” Sasha winces at the volume of her own voice, is careful to keep quieter next time. “I-it didn’t feel… _right_ to talk about it back in the archive.”

“But talking about it in the potential murder victim’s flat seems fine?” He asks.

“Feels safer than at the Institute, yes,” Sasha tells him.

And because Tim is _Tim_ , he… actually seems to relax. “I guess… it does kind of…”

“Feel like he’s totally creeping on our every move?” Sasha finishes.

Tim huffs, but Sasha can pick out the nervous edge to it. “Something like that. Definitely some pretty intense creeper energy there.”

Sasha bits the inside of her cheek and nods. “Yeah.”

Tim rubs at the back of his neck, shifts his weight from foot to foot. The floorboard beneath his right foot streaks quietly. Sasha watches him, almost uncomfortably still.

“So,” Tim finally says, “have you, uh, warned Martin and Jon they’re basically living with a suspected killer?”

Sasha blinks. “ Oh. No, not yet. Think I should?”

Tim shrugs. “I’d want to know, if it were me.”

“Right.”

There’s a moment, a beat of silence. Carefully, Sasha takes a breath. “And… you don’t think I sound, like, totally crazy?”

Tim raises his eyebrows. “No.”

“… Really?”

Tim sighs, softening. “Did you think I was crazy when I told you I saw my brother get killed by a bunch of plastic clowns?”

Sasha opens her mouth, shuts it again. But that is, apparently, answer enough. 

Tim gives Sasha a tentative smile. “I trust you, Sash.”

Sasha meets his eyes, and they just… look at each other, quiet, in the dim, butter-yellow light of the living room. Despite the circumstances, it’s the safest Sasha’s felt in weeks, like she could just stand here and look at him indefinitely. But that’s not an option, and Tim seems to realize that about the same time Sasha does.

He ducks his head, clears his throat. “Hey, speaking of _creepy_ ,” he says, “come check out what she did to her books.”

Perking up, Sasha crosses the room, standing at Tim’s side as he pulls a book off of Gertrude’s sparse bookshelf and hands it to her. “Oh,” she exclaims. “ _Oh_. What the hell?”

“Yeah,” Tim agrees. “ _Totally_ not something a serial killer would do.”

Sasha hands the book back to Tim, reaches past him to grab another off the shelf. “Did she do it to all of them?”

“Let’s find out,” Tim suggests.

It doesn’t take long to confirm that, yes, each and every book Gertrude owns with a face anywhere on the cover is the same: Gertrude has painstakingly cut the eyes out of all of them.

“Guess so,” Sasha mutters.

Tim takes back the last book from Sasha, replaces it on the shelf. “Was it just the books, or do you think she had some kind of personal vendetta against eyes in general?”

Sasha shrugs. The rest of the living room is almost frighteningly bare. “Not much else for her to… _alter_ like that,” she says.

“It is a bit spartan in here,” Tim agrees, wrinkling his nose. “Feels more like some creepy safehouse or something than somewhere someone actually lived.”

Sasha shrugs. “I dunno,” she says, “If you knew Gertrude, this feels… very her.”

“Even all the eye gouging?”

Sasha snorts despite herself. “That was a bit of a surprise, I guess.”

Tim huffs. “Should we check the rest of the place?”

“Mm.” Sasha nods. 

The rest of the apartment isn’t much different from the living room; there’s a bedroom with very little in the way of furniture and nothing in the way of decorations, surprisingly modern down to the sleek alarm clock on the bedside table. 

Sasha’s about to rummage through the wardrobe when she hears sirens, off in the distance, and her head jerks up. “D’you hear that?” She asks Tim in a startled whisper.

“Probably not for us,” Tim answers, in his normal voice.

“You don’t know that,” Sasha counters.

“London’s a big city. Lots of crime,” Tim tries to reassure her.

Sasha scoffs. “I just don’t want to be a murder suspect, thanks.”

“This was _your_ idea in the first place,” Tim points out. 

It was. And Sasha’s still glad she did it, even if there’s a sense of something unfinished hanging in the air around her. “You went along with it,” Sasha says, “you did the actual… _breaking in_ bits.”

Tim snorts. “Planning on throwing me under the bus?”

“No,” Sasha returns, “I would prefer neither of us ended up under any busses.”

Tim tilts his head, raises an eyebrow. “We could always just bail,” he suggests. “Not much here, anyway.”

Sasha hums. “Yeah,” she decides, at length. She doesn’t quite feel _finished_ here, somehow, but she’s also not entirely keen on being arrested. “Yeah, let’s bail.”

“Alright then,” Tim says, straightening up. 

Sasha laments not making the both of them wear gloves as she follows Tim back out to the front room. Tim double checks out the peephole, declares the hall empty, and Sasha just remembers to flip the lights back off on her way out.

Sasha steps into the cool evening air, matching her pace to Tim’s. A breeze blows Sasha’s hair into her face, and Sasha pushes it aside absently. She’s… not sure if she feels any better. 

She’s glad she did it, she thinks; the idea would’ve nagged at the back of her mind until she did something about it, but in the _after_ of it all she has to wonder what possibly could have even been expecting to find? Sasha doesn’t like not being able to find the answers she’s looking for, and in this case she’s not even entirely sure what the question was to begin with.

Scattered and lost in thought, she finds herself with her arm looped through Tim’s. She doesn’t say anything about it, and neither does he. She’s… exhausted, is what she is. There’s this nagging feeling, this sensation that there’s something horribly off, like she’s left the stove on before heading to work, but the stove is her job and her flat is the rest of her life. If Sasha was smarter, maybe she’d just quit.

But to quit now would mean to give up any possibility of finally getting to the heart of this strangeness — a strangeness which now seems intent on actively menacing her staff — which is… Something she can’t quite stomach, anymore. 

Leaning against Tim’s side as they walk to the Tube station, she mentally catalogues each and every new question as it pops into her mind, and adds it to the list she’s been building since day one on the job. 

Hopefully, she’ll have the time to find answers for all of them.

—

Later that week, a delivery is made to the Institute.

Sasha’s on her way back down to her office from somewhere deep in document storage when she runs into Jon, skulking around like a kicked puppy. He meets her eyes and says, “Tim’s looking for you,” before he ducks around a corner and vanishes.

“Okay,” Sasha says herself.

Back in the archive, Martin’s sitting at his desk with his hands in his lap, bouncing his leg nervously. “Oh, hey,” he says, when he spots Sasha, “Tim’s—”

“Looking for me, yeah, I heard,” Sasha says. “Where is he now?”

“I think he went to talk to Rosie,” Martin says. “Um. There’s… Someone delivered something? For you?”

Sasha blinks. “Wh— like, _here_? To the archive?”

Martin nods. “Yeah. Um. Tim has it, I think.”

“Okay. Thanks, Martin,” she tells him, before she crosses the archives and heads out into the hall.

Her shoes squeak against the tiles, which always sets her teeth on edge when it’s the only sound to be heard, but she doesn’t have the energy to bother to tread any lighter right now. She climbs up the short flight of stairs at the end of the hall, shoulders the door open with a familiar creak.

Sasha can hear Rosie and Tim’s voices, indistinct and talking over each other in the lobby, from all the way at the end of the hall. She rounds the corner to reception and spots Tim at Rosie’s desk, looking frazzled while Rosie looks him dead in the eyes, impassive.

“Look,” Rosie’s voice is impressively calm, “maybe you can check with someone in artifact storage. I’ve told you everything I know already, Mr. Stoker.”

“Yeah, but, _c’mon_ —” Tim gestures frantically with one of his hands— “ _You_ signed for the package! You, you had to have seen _something_ —”

When she spots Sasha, Rosie gives her one of her _looks_ , the ones that say _I am not being paid enough to deal with this_ and always make Sasha feel vaguely intimidated. Sasha flashes her a look she hopes to god is suitably sympathetic. (Rosie is not someone Sasha ever wants to piss off.)

“Tim,” Sasha says placatingly, cutting him off with a hand on his shoulder, “have you been shouting at my assistants?”

Tim splutters, comes to a stop, turns to look at Sasha. “I— No. I didn’t shout.”

Sasha raises an eyebrow at him.

“I didn’t,” Tim insists. “Alright, maybe I was a bit… _short_ with Martin—“

“And Jon,” Sasha adds.

“Okay, and Jon,” Tim relents, “but I didn’t shout.”

Rosie hums, vague and accusatory.

“I _didn’t_ ,” Tim insists.

“Okay, sure. Whatever you say,” Sasha indulges him, “but how about we go not-shout in my office and stop bothering Rosie, yeah?”

Tim dips his head, leans against Rosie’s reception desk, sighs deeply. He takes a moment, pulls himself together, and straightens up. “Fine,” he relents, lets Sasha bully him back down the hall and down the stairs into the archives.

Jon’s still gone, and Martin looks like a deer in headlights, torn between offering tea and trying to vanish into his chair. Sasha saves him the trouble of doing either and shuts herself and Tim up in her office. Tim slouches down into the chair in front of her desk, and Sasha perches herself on the edge of her desk, facing him, propping one of her feet up on his seat and poking his thigh with her toes.

“Tim,” Sasha says, “tell me what happened.”

Tim scrubs a hand over his face and leans forward, elbows on his knees, bent towards Sasha. “Do you remember that statement you gave me last week?”

Sasha nods. “Leanne Denikin,” she says. The however-it’s-really-meant-to-be-pronounced organ, the dolls.

The Circus.

“When she got her grandfather’s house broken into, her neighbor saw two men carry out that bloody organ. The police questioned her; her report says they looked legit enough, probably delivery guys or movers. Totally normal.”

Sasha nods again, slower this time. “… Yeah.”

“And then, okay,” Tim goes on, “today I’m in your office, and these two guys stop by. Normal looking guys, totally put-on Cockney accents, wearing… I dunno, some kind of jumpsuit, I think? Guess I didn’t really pay much attention, I was looking for you, and— whatever. Come in and say, say they’ve got a delivery for _the Archivist_.” He stresses the words, sounds them out clearly and slowly in an imitation of what must’ve been the strangers’ deep, Cockney voices.

“Okay,” Sasha says, although she thinks she gets what he’s getting at now. “And you think…”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Tim tells her. “I, I mean— Kind of. Yes. Maybe. It’s not— it’s just a _feeling_. Like, there’s no goddamn reason to think it’s the same guys. It doesn’t really make any sense, honestly. I probably sound— fucking crazy, but…” Tim shakes his head, swipes a hand through his hair. “They just looked so familiar. I can swear on my _life_ I’ve seen them before, and if they’re possibly connected to the Circus…”

Sasha nods, for the third time, even slower. She gives herself a second to process this new information, slotting it into place, one more piece of an unfinished puzzle somewhere in the back of her mind. “Tim, I… I don’t think you sound crazy.”

Tim huffs out something that might’ve been a laugh, if he wasn’t so on edge. “You don’t have to humor me, Sash.”

“I’m not,” Sasha tells him. She chews the inside of her cheek, bows out a puff of air. “You know how I used to work in artifact storage?”

Tim nods. “Think I would forget that? Some of those stories you used to tell…” He shudders dramatically.

“Right,” Sasha says, “well. That organ, that got stolen, the calliope. It’s… It’s here, up in storage.”

Tim’s face goes carefully blank. “So—”

“It might mean nothing,” Sasha’s quick to tell him. “But it could be something. It’s a connection, at least, between us and whoever stole it in the first place, and… and the Circus. _Possibly_ ,” she’s quick to tack on, so she doesn’t get his hopes up if she’s wrong. (… Even if she doesn’t feel wrong here.)

Tim makes a guttural, raw noise somewhere in the back of his throat, half a groan and half something else. Sasha puts her hands in her lap, picks at her thumbnail, unsure if her presence is a help or a bother. She never quite knows what to do when things swing to Tim’s brother; it feels like every step she makes is wrong and clumsy, when things are usually so easy with Tim.

Finally, Tim clears his throat and Sasha looks back up at him. He looks frazzled, but the storm has passed.

Sasha meets his eyes, raises her eyebrows. _Your move_.

“Oh, uh,” Tim says, digging a hand into his pocket, “you got a delivery.”

He pulls something out of his pocket and hands it off to Sasha. It glints, metal in the light of her desk lamp, but Sasha doesn’t identify it until she’s actually holding it in her hand.

“A lighter?” She asks, turning the little gold zippo over in her fingers. There’s some kind of pattern on the front and the back. At first she thinks it’s a weird sort of spiral, but it looks more like a spiderweb when she brings it closer to her eyes.

“Yeah,” Tim says with a shrug. “That and some weird table that apparently already went right to artifact storage.”

“Was there a… return address?” Sasha asks.

“Nope,” Tim tells her, “not even any packaging. They just left the lighter with me and the table up in storage.”

“So we’re thinking… definitely not _normal_ delivery guys?”

“That’d be my guess,” Tim agrees.

They look at each other, silence falling between them for a seemingly endless handful of seconds. First Jon and Martin and Jane, then Sasha and Michael, and now Tim and these delivery men. It’s barely been half a year since Sasha took the job, and already all of her staff have had dangerous run-ins with things they don’t understand.

That feeling of wrong-footedness returns.

What Sasha’d really like to do is tell Tim to just leave it be, take a step back and not do anything rash. But that’s not what Tim wants to hear, and he won’t take it well if she does. The thing about Tim that no one really notices is that he is categorically terrible at letting other people look after him. He ranks up there with Martin on sheer inability to be taken care of.

“So…” She says instead, “game plan. I guess I’ll be keeping an eye out for any statements about organs or weird maybe-Cockney mover-delivery guys?”

Tim relaxes, and in response, so does Sasha. If she plays her cards right, she can keep him safe, keep him from getting into anything dangerous.

“And I’ll keep looking for anything spooky-circus-y,” Tim adds. “… Granted the whole lot of us aren’t eaten by worms any time soon.”

Sasha huffs. “Right. I guess the evil worms are a little more immediate, huh?”

“That they are,” Tim agrees gravely.

Sasha can see what he’s doing; trying to push forward, move things back to normal, and she appreciates it, even if she worries. Cautiously, they leave it there, but no one in the archive gets very much work done for the rest of the evening.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> regretfully, elias is here. sorry, guys. to make up for it i also offer you tim deciding it's _his_ turn to pine and bring the archivist hot drinks when she's stressed

So this is where things currently sit: There’s a table in artifact storage that might be related to the death of Danny Stoker. There’s a thing that used to be a woman crawling with larvae that almost killed Jon and Martin — that did kill Timothy Hodge and Harriet Lee and all those people at the hospital— and there’s something that might be a man with twisted knives for hands that knows Sasha’s name and where she works.

Sasha is coming to the conclusion that there is something deeply, deeply wrong with the archives of the Magnus Institute.

Even when she worked up in storage, writing in memory books and sitting in cursed chairs, it never felt this… targeted. they were the depository of all things unexplainably dangerous, the place where you sealed away horrors and studied them with a clinical distance. Sasha has not even been Head Archivist for a full year, and already each and every one of her staff — including herself — has been chased or stalked or taunted or threatened by something that lurks in the dark of someone’s scary stories.

If she had any brains, Sasha thinks she’d fire the other three and quit herself, effective immediately. Maybe take a nice trip and spend a few weeks somewhere warm. Maybe drag someone along with her to make bad jokes and share drinks with.

But Sasha… doesn’t want to quit. There are things — there are _people_ — out there who are drawn inexorably to the archive like a moth to a fire, and right now Sasha is sitting right in the embers. She can’t just bail before she figures out the why of it all, and, selfishly, she can’t do it alone. Maybe if Sasha can untangle the ugly web they’ve caught themselves in, things can go back to normal.

So Tim is pouring over books and statements about clowns and Jon and Martin are sleeping in document storage and Sasha carries a knife with her everywhere she goes like it’ll do a damn thing against whatever Michael is.

This is what her life is now. This is her new normal, and she can manage.

Meetings with Elias Bouchard, on the other hand? Now, those are harder to manage.

Sasha is standing outside his office now, trying not to grimace too obviously. After she’d told the others about the Timothy Hodge incident, Jon had suggested going to Elias and seeing if he would change the fire suppression system from water sprinklers to CO2, especially with the increase in silver worms on the pavement outside.

This turns out to be much easier said than done.

This is set to be, what, her third meeting with him on the subject? Elias is… _proficient_ in talking around a subject, even when the subject in question is the lives and safety of the people in his Institute, and, Sasha thinks viciously, loves the sound of his own voice more than any one person has any right to. Sasha takes a breath, squares her shoulders, raises her hand and knocks decisively on Elias’s door.

“Come in,” comes Elias’s voice, oily as ever.

Sasha opens the door, doesn’t wait to be asked to sit before crossing the room and taking the chair opposite his desk anyway.

Elias looks up from his paperwork and gives Sasha a benign smile. “Ah, Sasha,” he says, as if she’s just dropped in for a surprise visit, like this meeting hasn’t taken a good six e-mails to arrange. “How can I help you?”

He knows damn well how he can help. Sasha’s been _very clear_ in her e-mails. Instead, Sasha gives Elias the least passive-aggressive smile she can manage in return. “I’ve been looking into CO2 filtration systems,” she starts.

Elias nods. “I see.”

Sasha came prepared. She sets a folder down on Elias’s desk and flips it open. “I have quotes,” she tells him, sliding pages of print-outs towards, “prices, services. Estimates.”

She looks up in time to see Elias raise his eyebrows at her. “You’ve really taken initiative here.”

“I just think we need to make the change as soon as possible,” Sasha says, “so I thought I’d try and streamline the process.”

Elias nods, hums thoughtfully. He steeples his fingers and finally gives Sasha his full attention.

“… If you think about it,” Sasha goes on. She’s learned appealing to Elias’s humanity is useless; no matter how much he goes on about wanting Sasha and her team to be safe, it’s all lip-service. When it comes to making actual, concrete moves to keep them safe, he’ll dig his heels in every step of the way.

No. With Elias, Sasha has to make it about the practicality of the thing.

About the money.

“It only makes sense. What do we have now? A sprinkler system?” Sasha raises her eyebrows. “On top of being just _outdated_ , you’re risking losing hundreds of years of documents and artifacts,” she goes on. “I mean, think about it. One person burns a panini in the break room and the whole place gets flooded. That’s the chance of losing all the statements, the books in the library, even the more delicate artifacts in storage. That’s—” Sasha shakes her head. “I don’t even know how to calculate that kind of loss,” she concludes.

“Hmm.” Elias nods. “I… I _do_ see your point,” he says, looking far-off.

“Plus, I mean—” Sasha flounders for a moment— “Sprinkles are. Really, they’re a liability. All that water, someone could. Slip and fall. Maybe break their necks. Sue the Institute.”

Elias’s smile turns slightly sour, but Sasha doesn’t let it get to her. Elias makes her feel sour, too. “And let me guess,” he says, “you’re going to keep giving me reasons to make the switch over until I actually approve it, aren’t you?”

Sasha nods, smiles beatifically. “I am,” she agrees.

Elias sighs. “Alright,” he says, “let’s see if we can’t work something out.”

—

When she gets back to the archive, Tim greets her with an overly-cheery smile and a bright, “You survived!”

Sasha wheels Martin’s empty chair over to Tim’s desk and slumps down into it. “Barely,” she tells him, pushing her glasses up and rubbing at her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“That bad, huh?”

Sasha makes a vague noise in the back of her throat.

Tim huffs out a sympathetic sort of laugh. “Yikes.”

Sasha lets her glasses fall back to her face, blinks her eyes open. “That feels about right, yeah.”

Tim’s eyebrows are arched. “Go any better than last time?”

“Marginally,” Sasha answers. “I think I’ve finally managed to talk him into it— good _Lord_ , that man can go on about _budgets_ — but the headache is just as big as when he turned me down.”

Tim bites his lip. “Cup of coffee make things any better?”

“Might make me feel like a human being again,” Sasha tells him.

Tim grins. “In that case,” he says, and scooches a mug towards her. “I have good news for you.”

Sasha sighs, shoulder slumping. “Timothy. You are a marvelous man,” she tells him, and then adds: “Sometimes,” so his head doesn’t get _too_ big.

“I know.” He snorts, and she takes the mug from him gratefully. “Might’ve gone a bit lukewarm. Didn’t know how long you’d be with double bossman, so it’s been sitting here for awhile.”

“I’ll live,” Sasha tells him.

Tim gives her a quiet moment to sip her coffee, until some of the tension inside of her unspools and melts away. It’s not hot anymore, but still plenty warm and exactly how she takes it. After dealing with Elias, it’s as close to perfect as she’s going to get.

She hums, relaxing back in the chair and setting the mug down on Tim’s desk. The gentle _tink_ of ceramic on wood and the ticking of a distant wall clock are the only sounds in the office. She looks around, unsure if the stillness is comforting or disquieting after all that.

“Where’re Jon and Martin?”

Tim huffs. “Lover’s quarrel,” he answers.

Sasha arches an eyebrow at him.

“They got in some row about a missing phone charger,” he elaborates. “Martin dragged Jon off to document storage to find it and defend his honor.”

Sasha goes for another sip of coffee, nodding. “Right,” she says. “Y’know, I can never decide if those two are closer to killing each other or running off and eloping.”

Tim shrugs. “Could do both.”

Sasha snorts. “Right, could do both,” she gives him.

“Any reason you’re looking for them?”

“Oh, yeah.” Sasha nods, picks her mug back up. “Just wanted to tell them about the sprinklers. Figured they’d wanna know since they’re—” She shifts her mug to one hand, gestures at the archive with her empty one. “Kind of stuck here.”

“I’ll send them to you when they get back,” Tim tells her, “as long as they haven’t ripped each other’s heads off.”

“Thanks,” Sasha laughs.

Tim grins at her. “Anytime, boss,” he says cheerily.

Sasha groans. “Do you have to call me that? Still?”

His grin turns cheeky. “Course I do, Sash. You _are_ the boss.”

Sasha jabs Tim’s leg with her toes. “Yeah. And I’ve got employees living in my storage room, and half the conversations I have these days are about evil worms. I think any authority I had is out the window at this point.”

“Aw, c’mon.” Tim nudges her foot back around the side of his desk. “You’re our fearless leader. We’d be lost without you!”

“Who knows,” Sasha says, looking down into her coffee, caramel-colored and extra-strong, “maybe if I was gone you’d guys have this Prentiss thing sorted. Maybe I’m holding you back.”

“Or we could all’ve been worm food that first day Jon got trapped in his flat.”

Sasha rolls her eyes, but it’s half-hearted. “I don’t know,” she says, dropping the playful air for something more somber, more true to how she really feels. “It still feels like— like I could be doing more.”

Tim sobers, brows knitting together. “Not a single one of us knows what we’re doing here,” he says, “This isn’t— they don’t exactly prepare you for evil hives of flesh worms in uni.”

“No, but…” Sasha frowns, trails off, fingernails tapping against the ceramic of her mug.

Tim bumps his foot against her ankle again, gentler this time. “But?”

Sasha shrugs. “But what if I can’t— figure it out in time?”

“Hey.” Tim leans forward, a level of gentleness in his voice that he usually saves for outside the Institute. “It’s not all on you, okay? We— this affects all of us, you don’t have to figure this out all on your own.”

Something churns behind Sasha’s ribs, and she can’t figure out if it’s good or bad or something else. She looks up, meets Tim’s eyes. She opens her mouth to say— something, she doesn’t even think she’s entirely made up her mind yet— when the sudden, loud reappearance of the rest of Sasha’s staff startles her and Tim out of their… whatever this had been.

They both jump, drops of Sasha’s coffee landing on Tim’s desk and Tim bumping his knee against the hard wood as they both retreat into their own little bubbles of personal space.

“I told you,” Martin’s saying, as he and Jon come back into the archive. “I _told_ you—“

“Yes, yes,” Jon cuts him off, waves him off and crosses to his desk, slouching into his chair without so much as a glance at the three of them. “I heard you the first time.”

Martin rolls his eyes with a force that impresses Sasha, even if she’s still trying to calm her elevated heart rate. He gets to his own desk before he realizes his chair’s missing. He looks up, confused, and startles himself when he notices Sasha.

“Oh!” He says, managing to find a smile for Sasha. “You’re back!”

“I’m back,” Sasha confirms.

Jon’s head jerks up. Sasha ignores him and stands, pushing Martin’s chair back towards him.

“Survived Elias. He—um. They’re going to be switching to a CO2 fire alarm system,” she tells him, “just. Just so you know.”

Jon blinks. “Really?”

Sasha nods, taking a few steps back towards her office. “Mhmm.”

“Oh,” Martin says again, “that’s— that’s good!”

“Yep.” Sasha nods, again. “I’m just— I have work to get back to. Just thought you should know.”

She retreats back into her office, closing the door gently behind her. She crushes a singular, writhing silver worm under her heel, and sits down at her desk chair. In this alone or not, Sasha can’t help but feel like she’s working with a deadline that she can’t even see hanging over her head. Everyday the clock ticks down to — to something, and whatever it is, Sasha’s dreading the day the countdown hits _zero_.

—

Two weeks after Elias finally makes good on his promises and switches the archives from sprinklers to CO2, Sasha is about half-way through recording a statement when a muffled shout from the archives startles her and makes her lose her place.

She gets so sucked into the statements sometimes. For a good handful of seconds, she lives in a moment of quiet disorientation until her office comes back into focus around her. She’s just reacquainted herself when a quiet, but urgent, knock comes from her office door.

“Sasha?” Comes Martin’s voice.

“Come in,” Sasha answers.

The door creaks open, and Martin pokes his head in. “Erm. Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt, but—”

“It’s fine,” Sasha assures him. Martin will talk around an issue for an hour if you let him get into his own head about something. “What’s up?”

Martin makes a face. “You… might want to come out here. Jon, um… Jon’s kind of. Made a bit of a mess.”

Sasha blinks at him. “Uh.” She stands apprehensively. “Ooo-kay.”

Sasha follows Martin out into the archive. He leads her over to a dingy corner, where Jon is standing and grumbling over… Well, ‘a mess’ feels like a but if an understatement on Martin’s part.

“What the hell happened here?” Sasha asks.

Jon sighs. “Cheap shelving and shoddy workmanship,” he answers.

“Jon killed a _defenseless_ spider with a heavy book and the whole shelf came down,” Martin translates, earning him a scowl from Jon.

“… And took the drywall with it?” Sasha asks.

“I told you,” Jon says, “shoddy workmanship.”

“Or more likely Jonah Magnus was just cheap, and this place is a tinderbox held together with scotch tape and glue,” Sasha reasons.

Jon hums, folds his arms across his chest. “That is also possible.”

“… Also possible that this could’ve been avoided if you’d just taken it outside,” Martin mutters.

Jon groans. “You’ve _said_.”

“And you keep squishing them! It wasn’t hurting you—”

“It’s existence in my vicinity was harm enough—”

Sasha picks up a fallen book in her free hand — she hadn’t realized she’d forgotten to put the tape recorder down until she realizes she’s still holding it in her left — and tunes out their bickering, letting it wash over her like background static as she inspects the gaping hole that’s just been torn into her archives. A hole… that doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. Instead of seeing brick, or scaffolding, or whatever it is they keep behind drywall — Sasha’s no carpenter, she’s an academic, c’mon — there’s just an open, gaping blackness. Warm, stale air wafts out onto her face. How far back does this go? Isn’t this meant to be an exterior wall?

“Hang on,” Sasha says.

Jon and Martin both fall silent. “Yes?” Jon asks.

Sasha looks back at them. “What’s back here?”

“What?” Jon frowns. “Nothing? Shouldn’t be anything. We’re… in the basement?”

“That’s what I thought, and yet—” Sasha gestures to the empty, open nothingness in front of her.

Jon and Martin both take a step forward at the same time, knocking shoulders together to get a better look.

“Huh,” Jon says, frowning.

“What the hell?” Martin asks. “What’s—”

That’s when she hears it. Sasha holds up her hand, cutting them off for the second time. “Do you… Hear that?”

Martin gives her a confused, nervous look. “… Hear what?”

Sasha thinks she figures it out about the same second Jon does, because she can see the moment confusion slips away to make room for a terrified panic on his face.

“I think we should—”

“Run,” Jon cuts her off.

“Run,” Sasha agrees.

“W-what?” Martin snaps.

“ _Run!_ ” Jon repeats, more urgent this time. He grabs Martin’s sleeve and yanks him backwards, into motion. Sasha’s right on their heels, scrambling away from the wall just in time for a hoard of writhing, silver worms to pour out of the empty wall.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for this chap: canon-typical worms and worm removal. uwu

"Oh god get it out get it out get it out Martin get it out _please_ —"

Sasha whimpers and bites her lip around a sharp hiss of pain as Martin pulls a worm out of the soft flesh of her cheek. At least it hadn’t burrowed down too deep yet — he’d just been able to grab it and sort of yank it out, he hadn’t needed to use the corkscrews, thank _god_. 

Martin’s still babbling apologies away, in that gentle, nervous way he has.

Sasha’s eyes are screwed tightly shut against the pain and the sight of worms burrowing into her skin. “Is that all?” She asks roughly, “ _Please_ tell me that’s the last one— ”

“That was the last one,” Jon confirms, and even he sounds shaken.

Sasha lets all the air out of her body in a long, shaky exhale, slumping back against piles of boxes, unclenching fists balled tight enough to send her nails into her palms and flexing her stiff fingers. She finally opens her eyes, sees Martin, pale and shaking. Jon, wide-eyed and horrified. They’re both bleeding from similar wounds, places where Prentiss’ worms had to be dug out with fingers and corkscrews.

Now that the immediate panic has faded, Sasha carefully takes stock of their situation. “Okay. Okay,” she says, not even bothering to hide the tremor in her voice. “Everyone okay?”

Martin huffs out a dry laugh.

“Well, I’ve been better,” Jon bites out.

“I mean, aside from the obvious.” Sasha rolls her eyes. “No one’s going to bleed to death, or anything?”

“No,” Martin manages. “I-I think. I think you were the worst.”

“Really? Would’ve thought it was Jon the way he was _shrieking_ —”

“Hey!” Jon protests. “The one in my calf was in _deep_. It _hurts_ being stabbed with a corkscrew. Anyway, I’m not the one who nearly got my face eaten because I had to stop to save a bloody tape recorder!”

“Yeah, that’s a good point, actually,” Martin chimes in. “Sasha… Why did you. I mean, why go back for the recorder?”

Sasha ducks her head, avoiding their gaze and toying with the threads of her shirtsleeve where Martin ripped it to get the worms out. “I dunno,” she admits. It’s a fair point, she supposes. It had seemed important in the heat of the moment, but now she feels a bit silly, especially now that she knows Martin keeps a spare in here. “Maybe I panicked a bit, alright?”

Jon hums. Martin makes a face, but they let it go.

Sasha sighs. There’s a sweater she doesn’t recognize hanging off an old office chair behind Martin’s head. Right, Jon and Martin have been essentially living out of this room for weeks now, of course their things are scattered about. It reminds Sasha a bit of one she nicked from Tim about a year ago. Similar colors, even though the pattern’s totally different. She’s still got it, somewhere in the back of her closet, and frankly has no intention of returning it—

That’s when it hits her.

She sits up, eyes going wide. “Wait. Where’s Tim?”

Jon and Martin’s faces take on a similarly horrified expression.

“H-he, um. No, he’s out, he’s not in the Institute right now,” Martin tells her, “he left this morning?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Jon confirms, relaxing. “I’m fairly certain he’s doing some follow up on a case.”

Sasha swallows, nods slowly. “Did he… Did he say when he’d be back?”

Jon and Martin exchange a look. “Um,” Jon says. “After lunch, I think.”

“Right.” There’s no clock in here. What do a bunch of dry old statements need to tell time for, right? Sasha pats her pockets, but they’re empty. She’s pretty sure her phone’s still in her desk drawer, cause she’s a goddamn professional who doesn’t text during work. Idiot. “Anyone got a phone on them?”

Jon and Martin share another look, before turning back to Sasha. She’s not sure if this new bond between them is better or worse than the endless bickering. It’s quieter, she supposes, which is a definite plus.

“Erm, there’s no cell signal in here,” Martin tells her, eyes darting to the floor.

“Right,” Sasha says again, curt and clipped. It’s not their fault, she’s no right to be angry, but… Well. She’s out of time. Jane Prentiss is here, and she’s trapped. She has never felt more helpless in her life. The situation probably warrants a bit of irrationality. She’s earned it.

She leans her head back, squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to panic. “Can either of you see what’s going on out there?”

“Er.” Martin shifts. “It’s… I mean. Just a lot of worms, really. They’re just…”

“Writhing,” Jon supplies.

“Eurgh. Yeah. Writhing about,” Martin agrees. “Christ, there’s so _many_ of them.”

Sasha hums. “Is Prentiss out there?”

“Not that I can see,” Martin answers.

“Okay…” Sasha frowns, forces herself to open her eyes. It’s hard to see past Jon and Martin, crowded around the door, shoulder to shoulder, and anyway, she’s not sure she wants to. She’ll take their word for it.

“Ew, wait,” Martin says.

“Hm?”

“I think she’s out there,” Jon supplies. “She’s—”

“Oh,” Martin cuts him off, suddenly going tense. “Oh, no.”

Sasha straightens up. “What?”

“Um. Tim’s back,” he tells her weakly.

“ _What?_ ”

Sasha scrambles up, pushes herself to her feet.

“Sasha, good _lord_ ,” Jon says, as she stumbles, unsteady from blood loss and pain.

She just waves him off, and pushes past him and Martin to get to the little window in the door.

She can just see him through the tiny window in the door. He’s just walked back into the archives, coat on, bag hung over his shoulder, looking at something on his phone. Like any other day. He does not see the worms. He does not see Jane.

All the air leaves Sasha’s chest in a rush.

The moment it comes back, she’s shouting his name, banging on the glass.

“Tim!” She calls out, “ _Tim!_ ”

“Sasha! He can’t hear you,” Martin tells her in a pained voice. “The whole room, it-it’s sealed. It’s soundproof.”

Sasha lets out a wordless, frustrated cry and smacks her hand on the glass one last time, accomplishing nothing but smearing the window with blood from a worm-wound on her palm.

She looks over at Jon, leaning half-against the door, half against the wall. “Move,” she tells him.

He frowns. “What?”

“Move,” Sasha repeats.

Martin gives her a stricken look. “You’re not going out there.”

“He doesn’t know,” Sasha says in response, eyes tracking Tim as he bends to inspect the tape recorder she’d almost died trying to save. “Jon, move or I swear I’ll fire you.”

Jon’s eyes go wide, but he scrambles out of the way even with Martin’s squawk of protest. Sasha yanks the door open the moment he’s clear of it.

“Tim!”

He looks up at her, instead of behind him, where Jane is way, way too close for comfort. “Sasha?”

“Behind you!”

It feels like Sasha watches him turn in slow motion, like the frame rate has turned down to an agonizing crawl. His face goes slack, but Sasha reaches him before Prentiss does. She doesn’t really have a plan, at least not any that go beyond _Get Tim Away From Prentiss_ , so she winds up sprinting at him and tackling him to the ground.

It is not, in the grand scheme of things, her best plan. They both tumble to the floor, a tangle of jabbing limbs at uncomfortable angles. Tim hits the solid concrete floor flat on his back. One of Sasha’s elbows jams into his ribs and the other smacks, hard, against the ground. It’s painful and awkward and maybe at any other time she’d take time to be embarrassed about the way she’s practically laying on top of him, but they don’t have enough to spare at the moment.

Sasha scrambles to her feet, yanking Tim with her by his hand.

“Sasha,” he says, eyes wide, wild. “Sasha, Sasha!” He can’t seem to manage anything else. That’s okay; no time to talk, either.

“Come _on_ ,” Sasha responds. She gives his hand a fierce yank, and he stumbles into motion after her.

She knows, somewhere deep inside her, that Gertrude must’ve kept her archive the way she did for a reason, but right now, with the fucking maze of boxes and stacks and shelves between her and Tim and _safety_ , she can’t think of any goddamn reason good enough.

Sasha narrowly dodges around a stack of boxes filled with folders and statements, but Tim’s not as nimble. His knee knocks into it, and he stumbles, his hand nearly slipping out of Sasha’s.

She turns back, slips sweaty, shaking fingers around his wrist and tugs to get him back into motion just in time for the worms to close in around where his left shoe had been just a second before.

Tim overcorrects and almost collides with Sasha, nearly knocking the both of them off balance.

“Go, go, go,” Tim says, breathlessly.

“I’m _going_ ,” Sasha snaps, as they scramble their way through the mess of the archives, and sweet fucking Christ, has this place always been this packed? It’s never felt this cluttered, this claustrophobic, this fucking impossible to escape, like it’s pulled and clawing at their clothes and sucking them in—

“Sasha!” Tim shouts behind her, half a second before his hand slips out of hers entirely.

Sasha’s heart lurches, turns itself inside out. Wide eyed, she turns — just in time to see a unit of shelves collapse in the few feet of space that have just opened up between her and Tim. She can’t help it; she shouts, a wordless expression of all the fear that’s eating away at every atom in her body.

“Just go,” Tim tells her, meeting her eyes, all the blood drained from his face. “Sasha, go, just. Go find help!”

Sasha opens her mouth to protest, but he’s already sprinting away, and there are worms crawling out of the fallen shelving unit right towards her—

She runs. It’s all she can do. She turns and bolts, crashing out of the archives, the door slamming shut like — and this is a metaphor she’s never quite understood until this moment — the lid of a coffin behind her.

—

Elias Bouchard is not a man Sasha ever wanted to have to trust with her life. She’d barely trust him with her leftovers in the break room if it was up to her, and yet here she is, her life — along with Tim’s, and Jon’s, and Martin’s lives — hinging on the man who didn’t even want to give them the CO2 system in the first place.

She has to believe he’ll pull through. She’s fairly certain he doesn’t want to get killed by worms, or lose his Institute. (That does make her feel a bit better; if there’s one thing Elias cares about, it’s this godforsaken building, and the hit he’d take financially if it gets overrun is surely enough to motivate him into action.)

After that, that — _wave_ of worms separates her and Elias, Sasha runs until she can’t hear that horrible, wet wriggling anymore, until the smell of warm rot and decay fades away, and then throws herself through the first lockable door she finds and slams it firmly behind her.

Breathing heavily, Sasha’s eyes scan quickly over her surroundings, and the dull sense of dread in the pit of her stomach does not lessen.

Artifact storage. If you were to ask Sasha the last place in the Institute she’d want to find herself, this would undoubtedly be a close second to ‘anywhere currently flooding with evil worms.’ Still, no matter how much she hates it up here, it is, she has to admit, marginally, better than the evil worms, so she supposes she’ll have to take it.

The worms will have a hard time getting to her here, at least. The door is sealed. Admittedly this is mostly to keep the things in here from getting _out_ into the rest of the Institute in case of catastrophe, but it will also keep the worms from getting _in_. She can wait here, in as close to safety as she’s likely to find, and pray Elias finds the CO2 release quick.

Sasha gives herself five seconds to hate everything in her life that has led her to this moment. She balls her hands into fists, presses them to her knees, doubles over, and lets out a low, frustrated groan. She counts to five, and forces herself to straighten up again, shoving all the fear and the dread and the general misery deep inside herself and clamping it down in a lead vice. She has never been a particularly brave woman, but she has always been remarkably stubborn, and good at compartmentalizing. She is not going to panic, and she is _not going to die_. She is going to wait in artifact storage, alive and safe and whole, until Elias gasses the Institute and Prentiss is good and dead.

She can do this. Sasha counts to five again, taking long, measured breaths. She pulls a tape recorder out of her back pocket. (Funny, she swears she left it back in the archives with Martin and Jon; she doesn’t remember grabbing it off the box in the storage room. She supposes she must’ve; a lot of things feel hazy in the adrenaline-and-fear soaked memories of the mess this day has become.)

She clicks it on with shaking fingers.

She wonders if artifact storage has always been lit like a bad horror movie and she just never noticed because her life has never so closely resembled one, or if a bulb just happened to choose today of all days to go out.

The recorder in her hand has an oddly calming effect; it steadies her, just a bit, makes her feel grounded. It’s like she’s taking a statement; people survive statements all the time. If she can reach that sort of detached curiosity she manages to find when she’s reading a statement left by someone else, she can pull through this just fine. This is just another mystery to solve, another scary story for the pile: how does Sasha James survive Jane Prentiss?

She takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says, “okay. Okay. What’s happened so far? I guess if I die some gruesome death, might be nice to leave some kind of record, right?” She takes a breath, huffs an almost-laugh on the exhale. “Well, I made it up to Elias’s office; he and I were going to set off the fire suppression system when we got separated. There are… there’re still plenty of worms in the rest of the Institute; I mean, not as many as down in the archive, but…”

She shudders, runs her free hand through her hair, thinks about the rush of writhing silver flesh that nearly overtook her.

“Still definitely _enough_.”

She takes a few steps away from the door. It’s sealed, she knows, and she doesn’t exactly want to get caught up in all the artifacts up here, but she can’t just stay still any longer. “I’m back in artifact storage,” she tells the recorder, “which I guess says plenty about how bad it is out _there_.”

God, she hates it here. She hates it here. Even with the walking flesh hives and knife-handed blonds, artifact storage still holds Sasha’s most unpleasant memories of working at the Institute.

Or at least it did until today, she supposes.

“This is where I started, when I first got hired,” Sasha rambles, “I was a practical researcher. Had to analyze and investigate all the spooky stuff that cycles through here. Wasn’t fun,” she adds, if that wasn’t obvious. “I transferred after three months. Think I might’ve just quit, if I’d been in a place to back then.”

The light overhead flickers, and Sasha passes by artifacts both familiar and not, careful not to touch any of them.

“Never understood why we keep this stuff secret,” she mumbles into the tape recorder, “I mean, we-we’ve got enough up here to send any sceptic packing, but… It’s just _locked away_. I…” Another half-laugh, exasperated and cold. “I asked Elias about it once. He just gave me some half-answer about funding, mission statements, that kind of stuff. God, he’s good at changing the subject, isn’t he?”

She shakes her head.

“But maybe I’m just rambling. What was I saying? Right.” She frowns. “Worms. Still seem to be safe up here, so. That’s—”

Something catches her eye, and she stops, remembers another day in what feels like another lifetime: Tim, frustrated and angry. Two deliverymen who may or may not be tied to the Circus that took his brother. A mysterious table delivered.

“I— I’ve found that table. The one from Amy Patel’s statement. It’s…”

She trails off. She doesn’t quite have the words for this. At first it seems fairly basic; a simple optical illusion, carved into deep red wood, trailing around and around to a small rectangular hole cut out dead center.

The longer she looks, though… the harder it is to look away. She keeps trying to follow the illusion from start to finish, but her eyes keep skipping, like she’s losing her place in a reading. It’s very agitating, the way she can’t seem to focus on it as much as she wants, like her eyes are stuck in a maze.

Sasha has no idea how long she spends staring at the thing before she hears it. Somewhere behind here, a harsh clatter, the scuff of something like shoes on the cold linoleum floor.

Sasha whirls around, but she doesn’t see anything. Heartbeat speeding up, she raises the tape recorder to her lips again. “There’s— I think there’s something else down here,” Sasha whispers into the device. She frowns, amends herself. “Some _one_.”

She steps slowly away from the table. Her footsteps echo uncomfortably loud against the tiles, the only sound she can hear. A fluorescent bulb flickers overhead.

Her first thought is this: if someone is still here, maybe they missed the alarm. Maybe they don’t know the building is being evacuated. She knows what working in artifact storage is like, and if someone’s left behind, she should tell them to get out while they still can.

“Hello?” Sasha calls.

Silence.

Her next thought is something slightly more ominous. She’s not sure what does it, but a spike of nerves, something like fear and uncertainty laces its way up her spine, filling her thoughts with dangerous _what if_ s and a near-palpable anxiety.

Sasha takes another step, then another. “Hello? Is somebody there?”

There: a flash of moment. A shadow.

Her next thought is: maybe she was more on the money when she said some _thing_ instead of some _one_.

There’s a door at the end of the hall. Was there always a door at the end of the hall? Obviously there’s always been a door at the end of the hall. But was it always that _color_? Ugh. maybe they painted it, or—

She sees what looks like a hand, and then. And then her skin prickles. The recorder in her hand clicks, buzzing with something like static, only it’s not on playback so there’s no reason for her to be hearing static from it at all.

Sasha clings tighter to it, a lifeline, something familiar and certain against a tidal wave of the dangerous unknown. “Hello? Show yourself,” she calls. “I can _see_ you.”

Artifact storage is not as dark and dim as the archives, but lights flicker, shadows cling tightly to disused corners, leaving Sasha squinting at the end of the hall, where the figure stands. She feels goosebumps raise on her skin like prickly static. She sucks in a sharp breath, something catching in her throat.

“ _I see you_ ,” she repeats, and this time she feels… she’s not sure. A certain weight to the words, a certain confidence.

The tape recorder whines, static pulsing around her head and coming to a crescendo that makes her ears pop, before clicking off of its own accord.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so that's season 1 DONE !!!!! fuck ya. thanks for reading, hope everyone is enjoying so far :~)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sarchivist: i will keep secrets for fun and profit:)
> 
> welcome to s2 folks. shit's boutta get fun

Here is a list of things Sasha James currently knows to be true:

1\. Jane Prentiss attacked the Institute, and is now dead, along with, hopefully, her entire hive.

2\. Gertrude Robinson is also, definitively, dead.

3\. There is something living in artifact storage.

4\. Whatever that thing is, it is, decidedly, _not human_.

All of these facts, while not seemingly related, are all connected in Sasha’s mind because she’d learned them all in the span of one nightmarish afternoon six weeks ago.

It had gone like this: Prentiss had attacked. Sasha had almost been eaten by worms, first to save a tape recorder, and then again to save Tim, which she figures was a much better use of any self-sacrificial heroics.

After convincing Elias to manually set off the CO2 fire suppression system, the worms had gotten so thick she’d gotten separated again, and Sasha’s only recourse had been to retreat to artifact storage to stop herself being worm food again.

She’d found that table from Amy Patel’s statement. And then she’d seen…

Something.

She’s still not entirely clear on what. She’s almost certain it had been stalking her, until suddenly it hadn’t been anymore. She’d _seen_ it, and there had been this uncomfortable feeling, a buzzing in the back of her throat, static under her skin, and then _it_ was running from _her_. Every time she tried to _see_ it better it had just retreated again, into that ugly yellow door and down, down, down, to a series of tunnels hiding somewhere deep under the Institute.

(She should be more surprised about that, but if any building in London is going to have mysterious secret tunnels under it, _of course_ it would be the Magnus Institute.)

She also figures she should’ve been more surprised to find Gertrude Robinson’s body, utterly lifeless and surrounded by boxes of petrol and old tapes.

That’s when she’d lost the… Whatever it was. The thing she’d been following, and instead found Martin, near tears, hyperventilating and half-hysterical, babbling about Tim and Jon and the worms and Prentiss.

And Sasha… did not tell him about Gertrude.

She’s still not entirely sure what her reasoning was there. She’d just looked at Martin and came to a sudden, crystalizing decision: she was not going to tell anyone about Gertrude.

And so she hadn’t. She’d let Martin lead her back through the tunnels, away from the room where she’d discovered Gertrude’s body, and finally out into the archives again, now crawling with ECDC and emergency response crews. Tim and Jon— battered and bleeding but wholly, blessedly alive— had been whisked away by some folks in hazmat suits to be decontaminated before she and Martin received a similar treatment.

It’s been six weeks now, and Sasha still hasn’t said anything. She was sure someone would find the body themselves, at first; the police and the hazmat crew were combing the entire Institute, including the tunnels, and no matter how much of a maze those things are, someone’s bound to find the little room with the dead old woman in it eventually, right?

But… it’s been six weeks, and still the only body found in the Institute belonged to Prentiss. (And Sasha has been checking; both on the news and through police and medical records on her laptop.)

Officially, Gertrude Robinson is still _missing_.

Which means there are probably only two people in the world who know her body is rotting in a maze under the Magnus Institute. Sasha is one of those people. The other is whoever shot her three times in the chest.

Sasha has had weeks to tell someone, tell _anyone_. But doing so now, after all this time, would only incriminate her, make her look like the guilty party. She tries to tell herself that’s why her resolve has solidified the way it has, why she knows no one else can know about Gertrude’s final resting place, but she can’t lie to herself anymore.

The real reason Sasha hasn’t told anyone that she found a body somewhere deep under her office is because she needs to know what happened. She needs to know why the archives are the way that they are and why there are inhuman things haunting her and how that resulted in Gertrude being shot to death.

And she knows, with some unfathomable certainty lurking deep inside her, that if she hands this over to the police, or, god forbid, to _Elias_ , she’ll never find that truth.

(And to think, Sasha’d thought the Head Archivist would be a _safer_ gig than those three months in practical research.)

It’s been six weeks, and Sasha’s finally being allowed to come back to work tomorrow.

Tomorrow, she starts looking for answers.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jon's progression as archivist is usually marked in fanworks as his hair growing out, whereas i think sasha's should be marked via a series of 3am diy breakdown haircuts in her bathroom. this is the hill i will die on.
> 
> update 1/21/21 - this fic is on hold while i finish the jm roommate au i'm writing. got hella invested so it's the only fic i'm working on rn. i'll pick this one up again once i finish that one, but there's not gonna be a new chapter here for awhile!

Sasha is late on her first day back to work after the attack.

She’s — scattered. Nervous, exhausted, a little angry. It’s fine. She’s fine. The last time she was in this building, she almost died, so she figures she’s allowed a little jumpiness. She spends her whole commute lost in thought (and almost misses her stop because of it). She’s thinking so hard her head feels like a beehive, too many thoughts vying for her attention. If she’s not careful, this’ll build into a migraine by the end of the day, and she really doesn’t need that right now.

She’s already resolved not to tell anyone about Gertrude, but the thing in artifact storage is another matter entirely.

Gertrude is dead. Callous as it sounds, she’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The _thing_ she saw is very much alive and on the move, and Sasha wants to do something about it before it… Before it does _what_? She doesn’t know what it is or what it wants or what it can do, but she’s read enough statements, dug up enough missing persons reports and grizzly autopsy records, to know what happens to people who get too close to these things.

Tim, Jon, and Martin are mercifully all in already when Sasha makes it down to the archives.

“Does anyone know where we put Amy Patel’s statement?” Sasha asks, as soon as she’s walked through the doors.

All three assistants turn to look at her.

Tim raises an eyebrow. “Good morning to you, too, boss.”

Sasha gives him an unimpressed look.

“I like your hair, Sasha,” Martin volunteers, from where he’s perched over by Jon’s desk, with two matching mugs of tea from the break room.

“Hm?” Sasha’s hand goes to her hair instinctually, hitting empty air where there used to be a long ponytail. “Oh, um. Thanks.”

She’d almost forgotten she hasn’t seen any of them (save for Tim, just the once, when staying cooped up alone in her flat had become too much to bear for even a second longer) since Prentiss.

She’d had to hack most of it off; whenever she moved, it would brush against her arms, her shoulders, and every time it made her think of something burrowing into her flesh, eager and ready to make a hive of her body. When she got tired of giving herself panic attacks 20 times a day, she’d taken kitchen scissors to it in her bathroom until it was short enough not to give her problems anymore.

“Right,” she says. “Amy Patel’s statement…?”

It’s Jon who answers her. “Ah,” he stands from his desk. “It’s. I think I know where it is. I’ll find it,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” Sasha says. She watches him head off, a little bit of the tension already easing from inside her skull when Tim stands and comes to her side.

“Got you a coffee,” he says, holding out a paper cup with a logo Sasha recognizes from a café she and Tim sometimes visit on their days off. It’s one of Sasha’s favorites, and it’s nowhere near the Institute, or Tim’s flat, which means he would’ve had to go way out of his way just to get this little offering for her and still be here on time.

All of Sasha’s sharp edges soften fractionally as she takes the cup gingerly from Tim’s hands, the tips of their fingers brushing against each other in the hand off.

“Thanks,” she says again, gentler this time.

“No problem,” Tim says, flashing her one of his easy smiles. Tim nudges her shoulder, and Sasha holds her coffee a little tighter. “You doing alright?”

Sasha uses the coffee as an excuse to look away, ducking her head to take a sip, and then Jon’s back before she has to answer.

“Here,” he says, holding out a manilla folder with a familiar case number penciled on the tab. Sasha fumbles awkwardly with it, shifting her coffee to her left hand and snagging the folder with her right.

“Why the sudden interest in Amy Petal?” Tim asks, when it becomes clear Sasha’s not going to answer him. “Didn’t we already wrap that case up, like, months ago?”

Sasha bites the inside of her cheek. “I need you guys to help me with something.”

“Oh?” Tim nudges her with his elbow. “What’s that?”

“Do you remember—” Sasha awkwardly flips through the statement with her pinky finger, until Tim obligingly takes it from her and holds it open so she can find what she’s looking for. “That weird table she mentions, in her neighbor’s apartment.”

Tim raises an eyebrow. “The one we got delivered?”

Jon and Martin both set their tea aside to watch her.

“Ah!” Sasha finally finds the segment she was looking for. “‘ _It was an ornate wooden thing, with a snaking pattern of lines weaving their way around towards the center. The pattern was hypnotic and shifted as I watched it, like an optical illusion_ ’,” Sasha reads.

“Right, yeah,” Tim prompts, with the air of someone being very indulgent.

“I want to know… everything I can about it. If you all—” She gestures to Tim, and Jon, and Martin— “Could just. Help me dig up anything else we might have on it? Maybe see if there’s any other statements mentioning it, or any others that might overlap with Patel’s in any way? Just. Do some digging, you know? _Anything_ would be great at this point.”

Jon gives Sasha a look. “Isn’t that a bit counter productive to what we’re meant to be doing here in the archives?”

“Maybe,” Sasha tells him, “it’s important, though.”

“Important how?”

Sasha fidgets, purses her lips. She’s already resolved to tell them the truth. After Prentiss, they’ve got to believe her. And it’s their safety on the line down here, too. “There’s something dangerous in the Institute, and I think it’s connected to that table somehow.”

“Dangerous?” Martin asks, squeaky in that way he gets when he’s anxious. “Dangerous how? Like. Like _Prentiss_?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Sasha tells him. “I don’t know what we’re up against. That’s why I need you all to help with some research.”

“Ah.” Jon says.

“Right,” Tim echoes.

Martin’s eyes go very wide.

“Can you just—” Sasha clears her throat. “I’d really appreciate some help on this.”

“Hey, ‘course we will,” Tim tells her, unflinching even after everything, even knowing this table might have something to do with the Circus.

“Thanks,” Sasha says, “really. And. And, all of you… be careful, yeah?”

“We always are, boss,” Tim tells her.

Which is a lie, and they all know it, but Sasha smiles at him regardless.

—

With Prentiss gone, Jon and Martin finally move out of the archive. Sasha doesn’t know where they’re living now, but they aren’t staying in document storage anymore, which means her late nights at the archive go back to being lonely and quiet.

Sasha never realized how much the clutter and sound and life of two people just existing in the same space as her brightened up the dreary chill of the Institute after dark, but now that it’s gone the silence left behind feels so thick it’s almost a physical thing, wrapping around her shoulders like an oppressive shawl. Without Jon grumbling and complaining, or Martin fussing about in the break room, or the two of them bickering in their office, every creak and bump sets Sasha’s teeth on edge.

It’s an old building, she tells herself. Even before Prentiss she’d heard noises at night.

But before Prentiss there hadn’t been monsters in artifact storage. There hadn’t been tunnels under the Institute and dead bodies, there hadn’t been things out there actively set on besieging Sasha and her crew.

An old pipe hissing becomes something hiding in the walls. A creaky floorboard settling becomes the footsteps of something on its way to Sasha’s office to cut her open or make her a hive or something else entirely that she can’t even wrap her head around enough to prepare for.

She’s not getting anything done. She’s still got missed work to catch up on from her sick leave and a monster to find and her head won’t stop buzzing, thoughts a hazy mess.

She sighs, pushing the statement she’d been skimming away from her. It’s not going to help her, anyway. She can already tell — It doesn’t feel like the real ones do, the ones that corrupt on her laptop and only record to tape. It’s just a flimsy piece of paper, recounting some poor sap’s supposedly haunted antique dining room table.

Sasha sighs, digs a knuckle into her temple and slumps back in her chair.

The clock above the door tells her it’s past 8:00 at night. Well past when she was meant to go home, but still early compared to some of the late nights she’s been pulling since she came back to work. Tim would have her head if he found her still here, but. That’s a battle neither of them are willing to concede anytime soon, so they’ve reached a bit of a stalemate.

Sasha’s at a bit of a standstill herself. She’s not going to be getting anything done here tonight, she’ll just have to accept that, but…

Slowly, Sasha stands. She grabs her coat, and her bag, and slips quietly out of her office.

Sometime during her time away, Elias had the wall patched up and locked the trap door she and Martin escaped from during the attack, but Sasha stole and copied the key from Elias’s office on her second day back at work. (He doesn’t even lock his office door when he goes home for the night. It’s like he’s _asking_ for a little breaking and entering, really.)

There’s no CCTV in the archive and she’s the last one still left in the building, but Sasha still feels uncomfortably seen as she undoes the padlock and slips the trapdoor open silently, leaving it ajar behind her.

The tunnels still smell dusty and wet, but that stale warm musk of worms, at the very least, has faded. At the bottom of the stairs, Sasha digs an industrial-strength flashlight out of her bag and clicks it on. She’s been down here nearly every night since she got back, and every night it feels like she’s walking a new path, even though she’s going to the same place each time.

She always finds it, though. Even if she has to backtrack, even when she gets stuck at forking paths and forgets which door she’s looking for, she always finds what she’s looking for.

A mustiness has built up behind the closed door, but the cool damp of the tunnels at least keeps the decay and the rot away from Gertrude’s body, which has just seemed to wither in on itself in the year or so it has been sitting below the Institute collecting dust.

But Sasha ignores the body. It’s not what she’s here for. Since coming back to work, Sasha has been slowly and methodically emptying the boxes of tapes. She can’t take them all at once; there’re too many to carry herself, and even if she did manage it, smuggling boxes and boxes of old tapes out of the mysterious tunnels below her office would be way too conspicuous. If Sasha wants to keep this to herself, no one can know what she’s up to.

So she has developed something of a routine about it: she shrugs on her biggest, baggiest coat, and slips tape after tape into its deep pockets until the bulge starts becoming too noticeable. Then she fills whatever space is left in her messenger bag, and brings whatever she can out with her.

She’s managed to empty one box since she came back to work, and tonight she’ll be moving onto a second. She doesn’t listen to any of them here — she hasn’t listened to many at all, yet. They drain her, in a way that feels awfully similar to how it feels to record the real statements, and she needs time to pick them apart after. She listens to one a night, on average. Two, if she’s particularly restless. None, if she’s had a particularly taxing day.

So far, none of them have been particularly illuminating. If anything, they just pose more questions than they answer. Gertrude has a… a sort of shorthand, with these things. Like she’s speaking in code to herself. Sasha recognizes some of it: last week, she found a tape about two boys who narrowly escaped a harrowing trip to a circus in Russia. After listening twice, she’d passed the tape off to Tim, but she remembers the way Gertrude spoke about it: with the same casual, resigned air she sometimes mentions things like _the Great Twisting_ or _the Hunt_ on other tapes, words with an entire ocean of meaning to Gertrude and absolutely none to Sasha without any context.

Sasha has yet to unravel the truth behind Gertrude’s words, but at least she’s been able to confirm one thing: Whatever the hell is going on with the Magnus Institute, Gertrude knew about it.

Sasha also has a sinking suspicion that _knowing_ is what got her killed.

(You’d think that would deter Sasha from taking this any further, but Sasha gets the feeling ignorance isn’t going to protect her, either.)

So Sasha gets on with her nightly routine: she stuffs her pockets full of tapes, then pulls her bag off her shoulder and fills it. She’s got a recorder at home to listen, so once she’s grabbed as many tapes as she can carry, she heads back to the trapdoor.

She’s not sure when she notices something is off. She’s just gotten the padlock back on the trapdoor when she hears— something. At first she thinks she’s imagining it, that she’s just hearing her own footsteps or the tapes clacking together in her pocket.

She freezes, hand still feather-light against the padlock, and listens like her life depends on it. (It might, after all.)

For a long, agonizing minute, Sasha stands there, stiller than the corpse below her feet, not even daring to breathe. The silence rings in her ears around her. She’s about to relax and be on her way when a quiet scuffing sounds from somewhere in the archives.

Every muscle in Sasha’s body tenses up. That feeling of being exposed, being so, terribly _seen_ comes back in a wave, alarm bells ringing in her head.

All she can think of is the eerie silence of artifact storage, alone save for the whirring of a tape recorder until suddenly she wasn’t, a figure that Sasha’s eyes didn’t want to look at, form shifting and indistinguishable in her memories.

She peeks around a shelf, sees the door to the assistants office hanging innocuously open, light spilling out and a shadow moving across the floor like swirling black ink. Sasha grips her flashlight tight, raising it like a club in her hands as she creeps closer, following the sounds of scuffling and shifting that becomes more pronounced the closer she gets.

It’s not even trying to be quiet, anymore. Maybe it knows Sasha’s here, and it’s trying to lure her out so it can— can _get_ her, whatever that means. Maybe she’s walking into a trap, but honestly this whole place feels like one big bear trap that Sasha’s had her leg stuck in for months, and she can’t just leave it.

Slowly, heart pounding in her ears, pulse racing, she inches around the doorjamb separating her from the place Tim and Jon and Martin’s desks are kept, and runs right into—

“Christ!” Tim exclaims, eyes going wide.

Sasha blinks, arms falling back to her sides so quick she nearly drops the heavy flashlight on her toes. “ _Tim?_ ”

“Fuck, Sash.” Tim exhales a breathless, shaky laugh. “Give me a damn heart attack, why don’t you?”

“ _You_?” Sasha demands, “Tim, I thought you were— I thought you left _hours_ ago! What the hell are you doing here?”

Tim holds up his hands. “Forgot my laptop charger.” He shows her the bundle of cord in his left hand placatingly. “Didn’t fancy spending my whole weekend with no computer. Anyway.” He narrows his eyes. “I could be asking the same about you. You told me you’d try to leave before dark this weekend.”

“I did try,” Sasha tells him, “Didn’t manage it.”

“Sasha,” Tim groans, head drooping dramatically.

“ _Tim_ ,” Sasha parrots his tone.

Tim sighs. “At least you’re heading out now, I guess.”

Sasha glances down at her coat, the bag slung over her shoulder. She hadn’t been planning on it, but she can’t exactly tell Tim she’d actually just been stealing evidence from a crime scene. “Right,” she says, nodding mechanically.

Tim eyes her. “You… were planning on leaving, right?”

“Of course,” Sasha says, waving Tim off but not meeting his eyes.

There’s a moment of silence, wherein Sasha figures Tim’s trying to decide whether he believes her or not. “Alright,” he finally says, “in that case, I’ll walk you out.”

The bad part about knowing someone the way Tim and Sasha know each other: it becomes alarming easy for them to call your bluffs.

“Okay,” Sasha agrees, “let me just… lock up my office, and we can go.”

“Great,” Tim chirps.

“Perfect.”

They stare at each other for a handful of seconds before Sasha caves and marches off towards her office. She can hear Tim’s footsteps falling in behind her, and even though she _knows_ it’s just him it still makes the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. Sasha straightens up the files left open on her desk, shoves them into her drawer, the one she can lock so no one — or no _thing_ — will get into it over the weekend. Her office door locks, anyway, but it feels good to have one extra layer of security, even if she’s not sure what she’s trying to secure things from.

Tim’s waiting patiently, and he flashes her a (smug) grin. “Ready now?”

“Mhmm.”

“Great.”

So Sasha grips the strap of her bag and hugs it close and walks with Tim out of the archives.

“So,” Tim says, breaking the silence on their way up the stairs to the lobby. “Do you almost brain all the boys with flashlights, or were you just excited to see me?”

“The last time we had an unexpected visitor here, the four of us almost got eaten by _worms_ , Tim.”

“Yeah, well. I would’ve announced myself if I knew you’d still be here,” Tim counters.

Sasha rolls her eyes, knocks into his shoulder with her own, then immediately cringes when tapes clatter noisily together in her pocket. Luckily, Tim either doesn’t notice or chooses not to comment, because they breach the front doors of the Institute in silence, chilly autumnal air washing over them.

Tim’s flat and Sasha’s are in opposite directions. They both know this, and they both hesitate on the sidewalk, reluctant to separate and go.

Tim scuffs his shoe against the pavement, stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Look, Sash,” he says, “I know— I know things’re… freaky right now, but. You’re not gonna figure anything out if you work yourself to death.”

Sasha’s shoulders hunch. “I’m fine,” she tells him.

Tim works his jaw. He looks tired. He looks a little bit sad. “You look like you haven’t slept in about a week.”

“Yeah, well.” Sasha shrugs. “Look who’s talking.”

“Hey, c’mon,” Tim says, “I’m not the one who stayed in the office for an extra three hours tonight. You know we don’t get paid overtime, right?”

“No,” Sasha gives him, “you just spend all your free time pouring over books about clowns and Robert Smirke.”

Tim’s expression clouds. “That’s—”

“Don’t tell me it’s different,” Sasha cuts him off, “it’s just a different monster.”

“Deep,” Tim deadpans, unimpressed, impassive.

“Yeah, well.” Sasha looks away, counting lit windows on the building across the street. “I’ll see you Monday.”

“Sasha—”

But she’s already going, heading off towards her Tube station. “Good night,” she calls.

There’s a moment of silence, before Tim calls back, “Text me when you’re home safe, yeah?”

Sasha pauses. Looks over her shoulder. “Alright,” she says, “I will.”

“Okay.” Tim waves. “Night, Sasha.”

After one last, lingering moment, Tim heads off. Sasha watches him go for a second before she turns and heads towards home, too.


End file.
